


rose-water, dragon-fire

by minorthirds



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Reimagining, Blasphemy, Defilement, Double Penetration, M/M, Mild Stomach Bulge, Monsterfucking, Other, Porn With Plot, Religion, Spoilers for Heavensward until Patch 3.3 - Revenge of the Horde, Throne Sex, Trans Male Character, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:01:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25405045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minorthirds/pseuds/minorthirds
Summary: He thought then, strangely enough, as a dash of moonlight dappled over his bedcovers, that mayhap the blade of knowledge—which he held close and continued to sharpen, upon the tip of which he had chosen to tread, that seemed every moment closer to discovery (and with it the accusations )—was double-edged.That he rasped the whetstone against the tool of his own destruction.The seduction and corruption of Aymeric, the Very Reverend Archimandrite of Hemlock Abbey.
Relationships: Aymeric de Borel/Estinien Wyrmblood, Aymeric de Borel/Haurchefant Greystone, Aymeric de Borel/Nidhogg
Comments: 64
Kudos: 117





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shoutz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoutz/gifts).



> quoth shoutz, "aymeric with a mouthful of monster cock: sorry halone"
> 
> i was enabled to produce this as the amalgamation of several friends' diseased imaginings with the added flavor of b3!ng p@!d. it developed a plot against my will. perhaps that's for the best; it gives me more space for smut.
> 
> remember to keep your blasphemous intercourse safe, sane, and consensual

The serene planes of the statue of the Fury, Her bleak marble eyes unblinking, seemed ever to draw upon Herself every glimmer of light that washed through the frosted panes; tinted though they were with ancient dyes locked into hand-blown facets, the wan light of the Coerthan sun yet labored to pierce the hoarfrost of eternal winter that leached all but every trace of color.

And so Halone labored in the annals of shadow just as Her devoted disciples must.

Aymeric lowered the burning end of the long match to the last of the twelve candles, and as he watched the delicate flame be cloven in twain he knelt at the feet of the Fury, setting aside the match to burn and smoulder while he closed his eyes in supplication.

None would disturb him in the side-chapel, not after he had performed his duties to the fullest extent that he might. He ached unto his very soul with the exertion of aether in the closing of wounds, the balancing of humours, the blessing and sanctification of the tools of righteousness that were brought to bear against the Dravanians, the covetous wyrms that would rend asunder with fang and claw even the most dignified of the Fury’s devoted.

Though he bent his head in prayer, he would allow the torrent of emotion to flow from head to heart unabated; many were those that eschewed an impassioned plea to the Fury, but Aymeric was rather unconcerned with the concepts of propriety that so enthralled the capital. She would know his heart, in tribulation and tranquility, and he saw no reason to convince himself that She would hold him in warmer regard for efforts at dishonesty.

Mayhap the honest resonance of his heart, the spirit of impassioned communion, was the first brick laid along the path of heretics and blasphemers. His father may think it so, at any rate. But there existed little room in Halone’s halls for the politicking of his betters, and Aymeric felt he better served Her by saving the lives of those devoted to the Fury’s work.

“My Lady,” he besought of Her at the closing of his soft prayer, “grant me the fortitude to give succor to Your faithful in this time of need. Dread servants of Dravania hasten Your warriors to Your halls; grant me the strength to save those who fight to serve You until their last breaths, that they might rise again and inspire still more to Your great work.”

Scarce had the last word left his lips before a sound behind him shook Aymeric to his marrow; he twisted as the dull gusting of wind outside the chapel crescendoed into a roar, the sound almost enveloping the shattering of a single pane of glass against the hewn stone floor. Candles guttered in the fell tempest, snuffed out in but a moment—an omen Aymeric took no liking to.

And amid it all, a sound that would linger unbidden in the depths of Aymeric’s mind: a derisive snort, one in disparagement not only of his heartfelt plea, but of his devotion. This he knew without the truth spoken aloud, as the intruder made himself known only when Aymeric had leaped (more stumbled, were he to be honest) to his feet and turned to the roiling shadows amassing at the entrance to the ambulatory.

This he knew without the truth spoken aloud, as great leathery wings flaring and then folding at the intruder’s back betrayed him.

“Believe you that your goddess is listening?” the man—the _creature_ —sneered, stepping out of the gloomy entry to accept Aymeric’s full, venomous regard. “Believe you that She would grant audience to Her pet _vermin_ that scurry about and feast and breed—”

“I will not speak to _you_ of misspent faith, _heretic,_ ” Aymeric spat, making to raise both hands before himself and against the demon. _Could_ he banish the fiend in his present state? He had labored for hours over the spent form of the Fortemps knight, and only at the first sight of drawn breath did he relent, stumbling back from the cot as though he were wine-drunk and starved…

The heretic would hardly know the difference, he supposed.

The creature, shaped as a man plated in red armor, folded its arms. As Aymeric sensed its gaze upon him, so too did he appraise the interloper; two pairs of dark wings were flattened against its shoulders, and atop its armored neck sat a wicked helm, wrought iron jaws with terrible teeth parted just slightly for Aymeric to see clear through to the metal of the helm’s rear.

Not a heretic, then, he surmised. He had never seen a heretic without a mad head to fill such a monstrous helm.

“Curious,” the demon said, its voice a low and steely rasp, alike to metal on stone; Aymeric shivered to imagine from whence the voice came, if the creature had not a head upon which to have a mouth. “You would presume to threaten me with a soul as blazing as a guttering taper? ‘Twould seem the children of men grow more foolish by the year.”

“How came you to this holy place?” Aymeric countered, caring not to hold the creature’s barbed words to his heart. If it could divine the state of him, it could divine also his conviction—and that also of his brethren of the house, scarcely a few dozen yalms away. Surely if he must, he could call one or a few to his side…

He could _sense_ the creature’s attention shift to the missing pane of glass, despite having no eyes by which to espy the movement. Though as Aymeric opened his mouth to rebut that even a _demon_ could not fit through so small an opening, the interloper scoffed.

“This church of yours nigh _reeks_ of defilement, little priest. Dark magicks are woven into its very foundation; the blood of demons and dragons stains its floors. Your Goddess has never protected you here; ‘twas but _disinterest_ that has spared you.”

Once more Aymeric’s lips parted, and once more the grating of metal in the demon’s chest served to interrupt, to halt Aymeric’s insistence that this place was no less holy than it had been when his own father had held Aymeric’s office.

“Know this,” the demon rasped. Its arms uncrossed; it raised a palm against Aymeric, who tensed against its corrupting influence afore he even sensed it, afore he realized that the candles behind him had sparked to life once more, blazing blood red with rings of inky shadow encasing them.

“Your feeble wards have protected you for the last time.”

The demon turned and stalked out of the side-chapel in one fluid motion, the sound of metal on metal on stone disappearing into the ambulatory.

* * *

  
  
  


Aymeric allowed himself but a handful of moments to regain his composure, to harden his heart against the tremor of fear that he was ashamed thrummed through him at the sight of the demonic flames burning freely.

And once he had wrenched control of himself back from the fear, back from the primordial instinct that bade him cower and tremble whilst the predator made a hunting ground of the abbey— _his_ abbey, Fury damn the bastard—Aymeric surged to his feet, charging through the ambulatory and towards the nave of the church.

“Intruders!” he bellowed, his throat already raw and hoarse from his earlier exertions. “To me!”

The guards came. The soldiers came, and they looked upon the panicked archimandrite with confusion and with pity, and they shook their heads at one another as they gently escorted him to his chambers, all the while with Aymeric turning to look over his shoulder at each passing figure, at each ensconced taper, trembling with an energy that he could neither name nor contain.

* * *

  
  
  


Sleep that night evaded Aymeric’s numbly grasping hands, and he lay awake listening to snatches of whispered conversation from the cloister beyond his door.

Some few of his brethren had expressed a desire for the archimandrite’s quarters to be guarded, and while Aymeric had the authority to refuse the charity, he had not. ‘Twas quite clear to him that they did not fear his conjured foe so much as the addled ravings of a nervous mind, as evidenced by worrisome glances and private concerns murmured while he stood with his ear to his door in the night, and he resolved to comport himself with firmness and reason even as the demon’s barbs roosted in his mind and jostled for his attention.

The creature meant to hasten to fruition its goals by means of confused and confusing prophesy; Aymeric knew this, knew the bewitching and muddling ways of their kind, how they preyed upon hesitancy, upon distress, upon cowardice. Yet the demon was confident, certain in his appraisal that the abbey’s wards had already fallen. Wards that had been placed by the previous archimandrite, Aymeric’s very own father, wards that had been bound to Aymeric’s aether when he was ascended. ‘Twould have taken not only his cooperation, but no small amount of coercion… and the demon had _raised his guard_ with such a pronouncement, which could only indicate its confidence in the matter being a foregone conclusion.

The Fortemps knight’s recovery proceeded apace, a welcome spot of relief; ‘twas no meager task to bring the man back from the Fury’s halls, considering his having had one foot over the threshold, but this Haurchefant Greystone’s storied charisma and compassion for the layfolk had reached even Aymeric’s ears.

Long had the adage held true: to come to the abbey at Hemlock was to receive a miracle.

As Very Reverend Archimandrite of the abbey, Aymeric was bound by honor, by oath, and by the magnetism of his own morality to continue its good works. He would gladly entreat death to spare another man his—and oblivion so faithfully dogged the heels of the Fury’s faithful that he could recognize even its most subtle signs.

The demon that had announced its haunting of the abbey possessed all the subtlety of a drunken chocobo stumbling about an apothecary. Its brazen nature all but ensured the danger in meeting its threats, but Aymeric could not say with any certainty that he had descried in the encounter the machinations of a more nuanced mind.

There remained much to understand in its intentions, and as Aymeric tossed about in his bed linens and watched the beams of moonlight move over the floorboards, he grew only more steadfast in his conviction: to ignore the threat posed by its presence, to choose instead the protection of his reputation and the assertion to both himself and others that the encounter had been but a phantom conjured by an overburdened, exerted mind, was to invite death into his house—into the Fury's house, for he had sworn to oversee the keeping of Her gaze upon the abbey's every brick and mortared seam.

He would weather the slings and arrows of incredulity, for to choose the alternative would be a sin too damning for the meager, buckling shield over his heart.

* * *

In the morning he rose with a conviction so unshakable he believed Halone Herself had put it in his breast.

Aymeric spent the cold hours of the early morning tending the herb garden of the infirmary, and the noontime bell sitting with Haurchefant while he partook of a simple supper. His charge had not yet awoken—the piercing wound to his sternum had been mortal afore he had been brought to the abbey, and it was a miracle in itself that the journey from the western front to these hallowed halls had not sapped the knight of the strength to live on. Every last vestige of aether Aymeric could bring to bear against such an injury would not be enough to keep a dying soldier from the sixth heaven if the man felt his work finished… and to return him to life in the first place would beget days of recovery in the process.

Despite his continued slumber, life was returning to the man, life evidenced in the silver lustre of his hair and the relaxation of his gentle breathing and the slight smile that graced his handsome mien as he dreamt of better days.

Aymeric could wish for no better sign. Yet even so, he prayed over the knight for perhaps longer than was proper. From the Fury he had been granted the clarity of purpose he desired to carry out the plan he had envisioned; his confidence was not lacking, but he would not suffer even the merest possibility that his charge might come to harm as a result of the abbey’s unwelcome visitor. The firmest aegis, after all, could not protect those from which it was held apart.

At midafternoon Aymeric entreated the abbey’s Temple Knights for their aid.

“Open the crypt,” he requested, and received only a handful of incredulous stares in response.

“Father,” one of them spoke, intent on dissuading Aymeric from this course of action, “there is naught to be found down there but dust and sadness.”

“I would visit upon the wards,” Aymeric responded, and the glances then turned to each other, as if he spoke madness. “Their health concerns me, and I can diagnose precious little from here.”

“But Father—“

He understood that they meant well. He _understood._ But the flash of a peculiar sort of urgency kindling low in his stomach brought sharpness to his tongue that he failed to suppress.

“On matters of the abbey’s security I speak with the authority of Archbishop Thordan VII. I am Archimandrite. _Open the crypt._ ”

Whatever misgivings the knights had held for Aymeric’s decision were stifled then, yet he knew well enough the hearts of men to know he would be granted only their _cooperation_ and not their _trust;_ that was to say, he had invited a crowing flock of rumors to swarm, no doubt in criticism, and perhaps in even assertions that the cracking of his burdened mind should render him unfit for service.

There would be time for Aymeric to repair his injured reputation when the threat that drew and commanded his attention had been banished from the mortal plane.

Ser Lucia, Lord Commander of the company of Temple Knights that held Hemlock Abbey, was the one to grant Aymeric’s petition. Mayhap he should have sought her out from the first; the three guards that barred Aymeric’s way and together wrung their hands more than a dozen nursemaids had only sent for her when it had become fully apparent that the archimandrite was not beyond hefting the great stone slab set in the center of the nave _himself_ abetted by none other than spite. Or mayhap it was for the best that he had taken this particular course of action, given that the satisfaction of watching three arrogant young men endure the lashing of their superior’s tongue seemed to outweigh the irritation of having encountered opposition.

‘Twas rather unjust of him to take such solace from her words, but he could not deny the pleasant ring of them in his ears as he descended the worn stone staircase into the cellarage of the abbey: “It is the sworn duty of the Very Reverend Archimandrite to ensure the safety and health of the abbey and its residents, and you sought to deny him because you _disagreed with him?_ ”

He ventured down alone, as had been his wish. He was merely reassuring himself of the state of the wards, of course, and expected no danger in the process; disgraced as his opponents had been, he might’ve faced greater peril with one at his back—the better to push him down the stairs.

The gentle thrum of magic crept upon him as a slowly thickening fog, and as he set foot upon the cold stone floor at the base of the stairs, Aymeric fancied that the tendrils of aether that rippled and ebbed around him with unseen movement might have evoked the memory of a paternal embrace. Perhaps in another life they might have. Perhaps in another life Archbishop Thordan VII, once the archimandrite of this very abbey, would have known Aymeric for his progeny. Would have seen fit to recognize the glimmer of unshed tears in Aymeric’s eyes as he knelt before the archbishop and called him “Father”.

Aymeric shook his head and stepped through the arch into the first of the several chambers. Sentimentality availed him naught; whatever the identity of the man who had placed these wards, they were bound now to Aymeric’s own aether. ‘Twas the sensation of their distant resonance that had fortified his certainty that they yet remained, but he could do little to touch and weave the threads of magic with fulms of stone between them and his grasping fingers. Immersed in them as he was now, however, he could gauge each minute fluctuation and catalogue the patterns; he could strengthen or shatter them with but a thought in either direction; or he could drink deep of the reservoir of aether and restore his own depleted stores.

If this demon meant to prey upon him at his weakest, why invite him to the only place that might be his salvation?

  
  


* * *

  
  


There were five chambers in all; three in a line from the foot of the staircase, and one each on the left and the right of the middle chamber, so that from a position near the center of that circular room one could bear witness to all but a few ilms of the crypt.

At the center of that room sat a large, round stone table, stained and pockmarked with age and with heretical uses; 'twas a magical artifact wrested from the enemies of the Fury in Her righteous conquest and purified, consecrated by Her faithful. To hear it told, all manner of fell magicks had been worked upon its surface afore it had passed into the possession of the Holy See, and the blood of the Fury's faithful that had been spilled against the stone had found a greater purpose in the wards now bound to the ancient runes ascribed around its circumference.

As Aymeric approached this table, from an arch around the corner—just beyond the reach of his gaze—so too did his quarry appear, an unhurried pace to its gait, as though Aymeric's presence was neither a surprise nor a threat.

Aymeric both _sensed_ and _saw_ the aether parting around the figure as a stream around a boulder, taking no notice or heed of the interloper; where it touched and twined about Aymeric, however, it simply flowed around the space the creature inhabited.

"What are you?"

The words, cloaked more in absent wonderment than abject horror, surprised Aymeric to be spoken; he felt no curiosity for the manner of abomination before him. (Confidence in his ability to create the truth he desired had served him quite well; what good is a man of faith who cannot force himself to believe?)

The demon's gaze turned to Aymeric, and while the archimandrite could espy no eyes from the helm, the realization that below its violent spikes a _mouth_ curled at the sight of him brought the icy shiver of foreboding to cascading down his back, not unlike a bucket of snowmelt being upended over his head.

"Your kind have no name for my existence," the demon spoke, and the embrace of pale lips upon each syllable drew Aymeric's attention, so markedly different from the rattle of metal in a hollow suit of armor was it.

"Then give unto me _your_ name," Aymeric said, the combative heat rising in his chest; when before he would have retorted with a barb, now it died in his throat, a victim of the hesitance that gripped Aymeric.

The interloper had made no mention of the wards _failing,_ the archimandrite realized. Only that they had reached the limit of their use. To see him abiding here was proof enough that he had spoken true, albeit in such a curiously deliberate fashion.

"Think you that my name will do aught to avail you?" the creature scoffed, though the unshaken resolve in Aymeric's gaze seemed enough to evoke a reconsideration. "Few alive meet its pronouncement with the _fear_ it deserves. Mayhap I will correct this course… beginning with _you_.

"I am Nidhogg, and all shall burn before me."

Aymeric's gaze had not moved from the thin and chapped lips that rested below the wicked jaws of the red helm, and it was for this reason that he espied a curious discrepancy; as the interloper spoke the name _Nidhogg,_ so did that mouth enunciate different syllables, as though… as though it longed to give a _different_ name.

Such an observation would behoove his later reflection; not so the invitation of the stranger's _present_ ire.

"Nidhogg," Aymeric said quietly, accepting the brutally sharp edges of the name in his mouth. "You have trespassed upon the innermost sanctum of this holy place, and I would know wherefore."

The ominous clank and shift of metal; Nidhogg moved. He strode towards Aymeric, who took several cautionary steps back, until the cold stone wall loomed behind him as Nidhogg loomed afore.

"For _you_ ," Nidhogg spat. "For the satisfaction of taking both your wretched life and your tainted aether. To feast upon them. To revenge myself upon you, _Thordan_ , the greatest of my tormentors, and to lay claim to your vile gifts. None other than this purpose could have called my spirit back from the very cloak of the void. _I am become your end._ "

A bolt of shock not unlike the Fury's spear went through him at the realization: he had been mistaken for his father. Whatever unholy, otherworldly retribution Nidhogg meant to mete out was intended for a man who now abided within the high spires of the Pillars of Ishgard.

Nidhogg was _late_.

"The man who stands before you is not Thordan," Aymeric replied, shifting in his cornered position to widen the spread of his feet. "I am the Very Reverend Archimandrite of Hemlock Abbey, and you will remember my name. It is Aymeric, son of Thordan; I am of the blood of your foe, and I will see you laid low in his name."

That eerie, pale mouth twisted; first in a grimace, and then in a smirk. "Pah. Mean you to bind yourself to the sins of your father in _ignorance_ of them? His crimes you may bear as his kin, but to serve him as _master…_ "

Nidhogg raised one plated, clawed gauntlet, and Aymeric tensed for the blow upon his face; yet a gentle touch of aged leather to the curve of his jaw burned more hotly than any chastisement.

“You would be wise to rethink your loyalties, little priest, son of Thordan. For his crimes I would see your abbey razed and your faithful reaped of their very aether. Will your master guide and keep you from this fate?”

 _No._ He hardly needed to linger on the thought, for he knew the creature’s words to be truth. His father would not abandon his post within the Vault in defense of them.

The duty, therefore, fell to Aymeric, who fought the urge to worry his bottom lip as his gaze flicked up from where it had fallen askance, boring into the shadowed spaces for eyes that sat within Nidhogg’s wicked helm. “Lest you forget, ‘tis I who serves as Archimandrite. The safety of my flock is _my_ duty to protect.”

He took a slow breath, feeling it expand in his chest, suffusing his limbs with warmth where they had gone cold and numb; the oppressive weight of Nidhogg’s presence struck a fear into him he knew not how to challenge, and—Fury forgive him—but a single course of action yet remained to him. A single course of action that might forestall the fate Thordan had engendered for those that dwelt within the abbey, that he had invoked without thought for the victims or the consequences.

“If you would have your fill of aether,” Aymeric said evenly, the press of Nidhogg’s palm against his cheek a weighty reminder of what he now pledged, “then have _me._ ”

Nidhogg gave a mighty snort. “I did not come here to make _deals,_ priest.”

“Then why did you?” The line of Aymeric’s mouth tightened as he gazed up, up into the nightmarish curves of bloodied, accursed steel. “Unto the very sanctum of the abbey, having extended its keeper an _invitation,_ ” for that’s what it was, he could see now; an intent to pique his curiosity, to _lure_ him to the crypt, despite Nidhogg’s seeming ability to venture wheresoever he wilt.

“‘Twould have been _poetic,_ little priest,” Nidhogg said, dark mirth at some private joke welling in an undercurrent to the creature’s brutal honesty, “for your _father_ to meet his end in this place. Yet to make mockery of him by laying claim to his _son…_ ”

Clawed fingers grasped the jut of Aymeric’s chin, and he felt Nidhogg’s appraising focus upon him with a grim sort of satisfaction. Mayhap he had been reckless in his haste to draw the interloper’s attention upon himself and _only_ himself—yet he would not suffer for even a moment the wounded in his care to languish under the eye of this ravening beast. Though the methods of _extracting aether_ may differ, the simple fact remained that none were so replete with it as he. Few could suffer the loss and live.

If the price of their safety was _this,_ he would pay it tenfold and he would pay it gladly.

Strong hands took hold of his hips, Nidhogg having surely scried in Aymeric's eyes a conviction, a clarity of purpose… mayhap even an _anticipation_ of the unknown. In this manner time and sensation blended together for a handful of moments until Aymeric found himself staring up at the ceiling of the crypt, back flat against the cold stone of the altar. The sensation of being _preyed upon_ gripped him from the heart to the spine, and he fought the urge to buck, to defend himself, as the gaping maw of Nidhogg’s helm loomed overhead.

 _“‘Akh Afah’,”_ recited the demon, claws catching loudly upon the etching of the stone. (He had said that no word could describe his existence; Aymeric felt that if he was to offer up his aether to such a creature in exchange for the safety of his wards, “demon” ought to encapsulate the matter quite easily, Nidhogg being of voidsent descent or no.)

Nidhogg’s mouth curled around the draconic syllables easily, and it was at that moment that Aymeric felt the first wisps of a peculiar dread come over him. He had thought the armor to bear resemblance to that of the Knights Dragoon, but…

Mayhap…

“In the language of my people,” Nidhogg elucidated, heedless of the pulse rising in Aymeric’s throat as he plucked at Aymeric’s cassock with those same sharp claws, “this sacred altar is named _‘endless circle’._ A fitting name for the site of so many blessings, so many _ascensions_ of those that would renounce their humanity and embrace the dragon within.”

Nidhogg’s great, violent, _draconic_ presence choked the breath out of Aymeric, the archimandrite who lay prone upon this altar, who had surrendered himself to a dragon thinking him simply some _wretch_ of a demon that his father had enraged.

The archimandrite who had disgraced himself in the eyes of the Fury by the ease with which he allowed himself to be seduced by the enemy.

However godly his service to his fellow man, mere _circumstances_ would not absolve him of the great sin he was about to commit, the gravest sin enumerated within the Enchiridion:

to lay down with a dragon.

 _O Halone,_ Aymeric thought to himself, enveloping his mind in the safety of prayer as Nidhogg lost patience with the stitches of his cassock and rent swathes in the fabric, much as an honest man would break earth in which to sow his seeds. _Forgive Your humble servant—_

“I will make you _writhe,_ ” the dragon swore, and sealed firm lips to the crook of Aymeric’s neck.

The press of fangs against Aymeric’s thrumming pulse drew from him a sharp gasp, and a shameful heat kindled to life deep in his belly, prickled across his skin like dragonfire. Nidhogg meant only to threaten him, the points pressing into skin too gently to break, but Aymeric arched against the dragon’s humanoid form as a heavy plated hand dragged down the front of his chest, discovering the secrets of his flesh.

Any thought of prayer, of forgiveness, of absolution fled Aymeric’s mind at the grasp of that great hand upon his breast, the touch of a claw upon the nub at its apex; sensation jolted through him, foreign but _branding,_ and the beginnings of a whine were silenced by Nidhogg’s shifting.

The dragon was upon him then, straddling Aymeric at the waist, appraising eyes raking down Aymeric’s bared torso where pale skin bloomed from beneath dark and torn cloth.

The cold touch of metal; ridges of Nidhogg’s helm pressed into Aymeric’s flesh as the dragon took the archimandrite’s nub into his mouth. Those great, wide hands splayed now at his waist, the better to hold Aymeric as the latter threatened to buck, a true groan escaping him at the hungry laving of Nidhogg’s mouth against him; the barest drag of sharp fangs and the groan turned to _keening,_ a wordless plea punctuated by Aymeric’s hands rising to grasp at the jutting horns of Nidhogg’s helm.

“Such a finely-tuned instrument,” Nidhogg remarked, the hot swell of his breath upon Aymeric’s breast a precursor to the dragon’s mouth moving, pressing to unmarred pale flesh. “I would hear _every_ sound…”

A hard suck of lips against the side of Aymeric’s breast, and the mark began to darken as Nidhogg’s mouth trailed down Aymeric’s heaving flank. At the realization of the prize Nidhogg sought, desperate heat swept through the archimandrite once more; his thighs parted in invitation, and he contented himself with the empty assertion that he meant merely to hasten things along. He would allow the dragon his pleasure, seeking not his own, the sooner to be done with this sinful act and the sooner to enter into penance and prayer, to bring himself before the Fury’s gaze and be consecrated in Her will once more—

Nidhogg’s claws made short work of his smallclothes, and Aymeric had hardly a moment to prepare himself for the long press of the dragon’s tongue against the cleft of his legs.

“T-Twelve forfend,” Aymeric swore, feeling the fork of Nidhogg’s tongue (for it split in twain at its apex; how had he failed to notice?) upon his slit with such intensity that he near shook from sensation. He was celibate, _virginal,_ and naught but the confinement of clothing had ever… ever…

A rumbling deep in Nidhogg’s chest, something like a laugh, vibrated through the join of his lips and tongue to Aymeric’s folds, and the archimandrite held his breath with furious determination, loath to allow the dragon the satisfaction of his pleasure. Perhaps divining Aymeric’s intention, Nidhogg chose that moment to _breach_ him, the inexorable press of that tongue, hot and wet and so broad as to cause Aymeric’s channel to stretch and flutter, fit to unmake him at the seams.

Seeking anything, _anything_ to anchor his mind to, lest he find himself wholly unmoored and at the wyrm's surely devious mercy, Aymeric discovered at last the questing edges of Nidhogg's aether. Against it Aymeric's own aetheric reserves flickered like smouldering coals, and he was afraid suddenly of the prospect of Nidhogg draining him of near every drop. A niggling concern in the back of his mind cautioned him against drawing from the aether that swirled about the heretic altar, the aether that clung to him like dewy cobwebs, but…

The tips of Nidhogg's impossibly long tongue pressed against the seal at the root of his channel, there to coil inside and _fill_ him, and at that blunt pressure and coalescing warmth enveloped by the sensation of Nidhogg's _hunger,_ the insatiable appetite for aether that sought to devour Aymeric whole, the archimandrite found his peak, the conflux of sensation finding harmony within his enraptured form as he arched and bucked his hips, desperate to feel Nidhogg deeper, to feel _more_ …

As the wyrm drank deep of the aether that answered Aymeric's call, that flooded through him as a conduit, Aymeric himself shivered and writhed in Nidhogg's thrall. Something inside of him had _bent_ , to be possessed so thoroughly, to have felt such unholy rapture… something that could be straightened, set to rights given time, but whyever would he…?

Aymeric opened his eyes and discovered he was alone.

Nidhogg had gone, and with him had the shimmering density of aether that had pervaded the crypt. What remained were but echoes, the sedimentary residue of the great reservoir of aether that had dwelt here—that Nidhogg had drained, using Aymeric as the siphon. And were Nidhogg to be believed, it had long overgrown its use afore the wyrm had set his sight upon his prize.

Too blinded by his own pleasure, Aymeric had failed to regulate the current that had swept through him. Too blinded by the particulars of his grave sin, he had failed to negotiate the parameters of his deal with the dragon, to ensure that Nidhogg would not remain to slake his terrible hunger on anyone other than the archimandrite; such a demand had been rather more implied than stated, but Nidhogg's tongue (a shiver ran through Aymeric to recall the sensation of it) was cunning, and he had spoken naught of a precedence set by their… by their _coupling_ (there was no sense fearing to name it).

Aymeric lay upon the Akh Afah altar, the raiments of his office sullied and ruined, his legs spread and his folds slick with his own arousal. He burned with shame knowing the eyes of the Fury rested upon him, but he burned _greater_ with unfamiliar want, a hunger that lanced through his veins like a fell poison—a hunger left to him as a reminder of Nidhogg's claim upon him, that marked him as thoroughly as the bites and bruises that he shivered to recall.

He had been _tainted_ —though for all of his failures and preoccupations, Aymeric found he could not muster an ilm of _regret._

He had paid gladly, and—a shudder ran through him, a flutter of his channel at the memory of the feeling of fullness, of _rightness,_ and he found himself slickening with renewed arousal _—he would pay it again, if he must._


	2. ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back_on_my_bullshit.doc
> 
> i have little to add here besides that a plot begins to make itself known between paragraphs of unrepentant blasphemy. it's there. somewhere. i promise
> 
> enjoy xoxo

Aymeric closed the door to his room, and nigh-instantly crumpled into himself, like ice thawing from the center out and leaving only a frail, fragile crust.

The borrowed robe he had worn to preserve both his modesty and his beleaguered reputation, which was naught more than a bolt of linen with a few seams sewn in to give it at least a semblance of a shape, shifted with him and slipped from one shoulder; it was  _ absurdly _ oversized, but he had already been trespassing on the very limits of Ser Lucia's suspension of disbelief in the mere requesting of it.

He had stood out of sight in the shadows of the stairs, the better to conceal his  _ circumstances  _ from eyes he could not trust (for to admit his sin to any save the Fury was to invoke their retribution, as certain as it was held that the blighted touch of a  _ dragon _ would never,  _ ever _ be repented) and called out to her from where she stood guard in the transept of the church. She had not offered to accompany him, but she had maintained that granting his petition was  _ her  _ responsibility, one that she was bound to see through personally. And from her silence at the first, despite the excuse of dust and grime and tear he had conjured, he had feared her trust jealously guarded, her suspicions invited… and he had continued to fear as much, to his chagrin, until she made good on her promise and a bundle of fabric was tossed down, swift and ungentle.

Aymeric sighed and gazed about his moonlight-dappled room, severe in its furnishings and lacking in its personal effects precisely as befitted a devoted priest. He longed for a bath, the means by which to do so mayhap the sole manner in which he makes considerable use of his station, but afore such a selfish, luxurious diversion… first he must purify himself  _ spiritually _ , a task to be set about single-mindedly, the better to chase out any trace of the taint that still remained within him.

Despite his abundance of experience with the manner of prayer and confession he meant to enter into, Aymeric found a quaver in his hands as he moved to prepare; his personal copy of the _ Enchiridion,  _ worn with use to the point of its grooves and divots mirroring the tips of his fingers and the pressure they apply, weighed unfamiliarly and uncomfortably in his grip, as though replete with the shame and the guilt its sight and feel brought upon him. His flesh, though bare under the worn stitches of linen, felt aglow with warmth. And as he finally cast his gaze to the table upon which sat a stand for lit sticks of incense…

Threads of smoke rose unbroken toward the ceiling, trailing from twin embers, still ilms from the ashtray; 'twas a curiously  _ intimate  _ number, as the stand was made to accommodate only one, and to force the second to abide the same entrance…

The image evoked in Aymeric a sudden terrible imagining, awash with heat and shame and an insatiable  _ hunger;  _ beyond his control, every ilm of his body sang out for the want to feel  _ full,  _ to feel the pull of that tainted aether within him, seeking, desperately seeking—

Aymeric cried out as his stumble toward the table brought him against the laddered back of a chair, and while his hands found their purchase upon it, so too did the meager and yet delicious temptation to rut against the spine of it, to untether himself from the responsibility of repentance and to immerse himself in the depravity of remorseless surrender.

This desire was not his  _ own,  _ he meant to reason, but it seemed such a baseless lie, given the ferocity with which he hungered even lacking the presence of the monster that planted this fell seed within him—

Aymeric stiffened at the touch of bare palms upon him, one resting upon each hip, the weight of them altogether too light to belong to the one he expected; rather than turn about in his half-clothed state he merely clenched his teeth, unsure how an intruder had escaped his notice, wondering who would have seen fit to sneak into his chambers and light twin sticks of incense—

To lie in wait for him and place hands upon him as  _ property— _

"Ah," Nidhogg breathed behind him, that accursed mouth of his too close to the bared expanse of Aymeric's left shoulder. "At last."

Aymeric  _ hated _ himself for the way his tension smoothed, the way the fight in his limbs ebbed at the dark rasp of the dragon's throat. 'Twas not that he trusted the wyrm—for he would never stoop to such depths of depravity—but that the aim of this nemesis was  _ known  _ to him, that he need not wrap his mind around every undercurrent of emotion to descry his intentions…

Perhaps also that he feared that Nidhogg had absconded no further than the infirmary, given there had been no swearing to terms, merely the speaking of consent, the  _ union _ of flesh—

"Feared you that I had gone?" Nidhogg breathed, and those curiously light hands tensed in their grip upon Aymeric even as the wyrm pressed closer, as if almost to gather the archimandrite to him, to press the man against the planes and ridges of his stained armor. "Little priest," a gentle graze of teeth against the point of Aymeric's ear and a tongue of fire shot through him, a  _ hunger _ that had been shocked away by the suddenness of the dragon's appearance, "you are  _ mine _ ."

How came Nidhogg to his quarters without alerting the guards? What meant he to gain by lingering here? For what reason had he assembled paraphernalia for Aymeric's prayer to the Fury?

"What would you have of me?" Aymeric murmured instead, frozen in the grip of iron-jawed hands, the hard press of the priest against the chair afore him reminding him of the desire to rut that had seized him mere moments before. He  _ would not,  _ he assured himself strongly,  _ seek his own pleasure.  _ He must not. For the Fury wa s fair, and She knew the depths of his heart, and She would remit her punishment only in the case that he had acted in the interests of the Fury and Her faithful.

His smouldering desire to be claimed by Nidhogg served only insofar as it dissuaded the dragon from seeking his ponze of aether from those less able to give it.

This was how it  _ must _ be.

"Why," Nidhogg breathed against the shell of Aymeric's ear once more and the archimandrite shook with the effort of guarding his arousal, "only the continued safety of my most  _ coveted  _ possession _." _

"What do you—?" Aymeric meant to respond, but the inconspicuous gesture of Nidhogg's thin lips closing against his ear to  _ nip  _ and to  _ suck  _ drove all memories of sound from his mind. At the feeling of Nidhogg's wet tongue laving hungrily at his skin, Aymeric could only slacken in the bonds of his "captor", a groan rising unbidden from the annals of his chest.

"Two of your men," Nidhogg began, and the assertion of other interlopers should have brought clarity to Aymeric's mind, should have invited repentance and reasoning, but Nidhogg's bared hands (glimmering like the fathomless depths of fresh ink under the moonlight) slipped up and through the open front of Aymeric's cloak and took gentle hold of his breasts. "Stole into your quarters under cover of night, the better to slay their  _ steadfast protector _ , for fear that the taint of the dragon within him might fester and spread. I dealt with them. Death is my answer to the ignominy of threats against," Nidhogg's chapped lips had been pressing thin kisses to the column of Aymeric's neck between spoken words, though at this proclamation Aymeric tensed perceptibly such that the trail halted as Nidhogg stilled against him, " _ my prize _ ."

Aymeric's thoughts ran sluggish as cold syrup, distracted as he was by the unfamiliar,  _ intriguing  _ texture upon his sensitive flesh; the ridges of cold scales pressed against his bare breasts as Nidhogg's long, strong fingers took hold of him, and at the slow drag of a scaled digit upon his nub Aymeric fought not to exhale, not to give voice to the jolt to his nethers at Nidhogg's touch.

He was embarrassingly wet with arousal, and Nidhogg had just admitted to murder in Aymeric's defense.

Aymeric could picture the figures of the two Temple Knights in his mind, the two that had barred his path before Ser Lucia bade them move. One much taller than he, the other not much shorter. He  _ wanted  _ to revile the deed. Wanted to hate Nidhogg for the injustice. Wanted, wanted…

"Have you no words for me?" the wyrm growled hotly into the ridge of Aymeric's pulse. "Have you no absolution to mete out? I want your  _ anger, _ little priest."

"I shall not give it," Aymeric swore, and Nidhogg's lips against his neck curled into a savage smirk—

afore fangs centered over his thrumming heartbeat pressed into skin and  _ bit. _

The sharp groan that left Aymeric's mouth at the sensation of Nidhogg's suckling, at the sensation of drops of blood spilling from the wound into the ravening maw of the creature. 'Twas not about the copper tang of his lifeblood, Aymeric knew, but the trickles of aether that flowed between every droplet; he felt his drained body tensing and slackening in equal measure, and he settled both hands upon the back of the chair and  _ held _ , willing the tremor of his legs to still.

Nidhogg meant to drink his fill of him, and mayhap then to toss him aside.

Though Aymeric was hard-pressed for mastery over his thoughts, he drove one errant murmur to the forefront of his mind.

"Give me your word," the archimandrite said, his chest heaving with the exertion of formulating words when Nidhogg drained from him traces of his very essence, "that while I yet live,  _ my _ aether will be your only sustenance." He harbored no illusions; whatever Nidhogg had done with the bodies he claimed to have slain, he had taken of their aether for his own. However much the wyrm meant Aymeric to languish in guilt for the deaths of his nemeses, 'twas clear to Aymeric that his fault had been in failing to extricate the oath from the dragon afore he had reached the height of his pleasure.

"Aether willingly surrendered," Nidhogg answered, the laving of his spit-slickened tongue against the twin pricks in Aymeric's neck bequeathing upon him a gentle tingling, "is the sole sustenance of this form, little priest. Why else would I have taken you so  _ intimately _ , so  _ thoroughly _ ?"

"What did you do with the bodies?" Aymeric ground out in response, his voice gravelly with doubt. "If they were not to feed your insatiable appetite, why kill those men?"

A gasp tore from Aymeric's mouth when a scaled hand plunged suddenly southward, those curiously scaled fingers parting the folds of Aymeric's channel and stroking shallowly between them, a noise of  _ wetness  _ coloring Aymeric's cheeks as the very tip of a finger—gently tapered, but with a claw more soft than sharp, blunt and pliant like a molded square of rubber though with enough spine to press without flexing—delved shallowly into his slit, not deep enough to sate a burning ache but plenty deep to draw from Aymeric a moan and a fluttering of his walls.

"I have told you," Nidhogg repeated, teasing Aymeric who shivered in his icewater grip at the barest reminder of his position, his  _ role _ in these proceedings. "So shall I continue to; you are  _ mine _ , pet, and no petty plot of murder will deprive me of your divine taste."

Aymeric could no longer resist the temptation, not at words like that spoken in regard of him; he hated himself for rocking his hips down, for seizing Nidhogg's fingers inside of him, for chasing his own pleasure at such empty words, for being taken in so easily by the honeyed proclamations of the wyrm. He grasped the back of the chair and canted his hips sharply down and back, and was rewarded with Nidhogg's fingertips punching deeper into his aching channel. " _ Ah _ ," Aymeric moaned, his back arching at the feeling of being  _ filled. _

"Deride me," the dragon said, securing his iron grip against Aymeric's hipbone, the better to halt the questing for  _ depth  _ the archimandrite was embarking upon. "Revile me. Call down upon me all the slings and arrows of your feeble faith, that I may brush them aside and show you the true worth of your goddess."

"The Fury," Aymeric said with great difficulty, the shame of invoking Her in such a fraught, accursed situation weighing heavy upon his chest, "renders Her own judgement, irrespective of Her faithful's wishes. To conspire to murder the Very Reverend Archimandrite of this abbey bespeaks an arrogant confidence in one's own capacity for judgement; it is an act that condemns the conspirators to remain forever outside Her grace. I am Her disciple, and in all things I defer to Her wisdom." With whitened knuckles he held himself to the back of the chair, the slender girth of Nidhogg's scale-peppered fingers pressing him open both a terrible distraction and the catalyst for his unclouded pronouncement. "Defile me if you will, wyrm. I welcome your hunger, for I act in service to the Fury and by Her will shall I remain above your sacrilege."

A smoke-laced rumble from behind him drew Aymeric's attention before the fingers settled within him  _ pushed _ , securing a desperate whine; Aymeric's spine straightened as the demon pressed to his back bowed his head to nibble at the tip of his pointed ear.

"Your  _ conviction, _ " Nidhogg said, almost conversationally as he worked two fingers deep into Aymeric's core before slowly withdrawing them, the incessant tidal push and pull of  _ fullness _ and  _ emptiness _ blanking all thoughts of competition and contention and righteousness from Aymeric's mind in favor of the fiery want that Nidhogg evoked from him, "is fascinating. Useless, but fascinating."

Aymeric did not respond. He did not need to; the challenge offered to him was beneath him, and if Nidhogg refused to see just how he himself had become an agent of the Fury's will, no matter how he decried her and how he railed against such a fate, Aymeric held no desire to waste his breath in vain attempts to convince him.

Nidhogg's thumb shifted and rose to press against a tight knot of pleasure just within the part of Aymeric's folds, and Aymeric lay his head back and panted, hungering to reach his crest with Nidhogg buried within him; he bucked his hips, the craving overtaking any desire to hide it from the wyrm who wrung his pleasure from his needful form.

With a thoughtful hum, Nidhogg secured his lips against the thrum of Aymeric's pulse once more, less as an imminent threat and more instead a reminder of the use Aymeric served, the purpose he fulfilled, one upon which they might disagree but that was reached through the same means: of Aymeric surrendering himself to the dragon's pleasure, surrendering himself to the base wants of the enemy.

Knowing as he now did, understanding as he now did, the path which had been laid out before him—to make of this wyrm an unknowing agent of the Fury's will, to be the bait placed upon an iron-jawed trap—Aymeric  _ writhed _ as disparate sensation and feeling came into harmony with the suddenness of a thunderclap, sang through his limbs as though a melody wrung from his desperate tension. He came terribly undone by Nidhogg's ministrations, ministrations given in the form of a man though with the jealous, consuming intent of a true dragon.

Nidhogg's fingers did not still within him at the reaching of Aymeric's peak; on the contrary they worked with even greater determination, greater insistence, the taper of a third long, skilled finger pressing at Aymeric's entrance with silent intention.

"Yes," he might have breathed—the roar of his climax in his ears had yet to fade—and despite the waves of sensation he rode he splayed his thighs just an ilm wider, pinned between the expanse of Nidhogg's plated torso and the chair he had clung to desperately for support and yet so eager one might believe 'twas his own machinations that arrived him here.

A wanton groan escaped him as Nidhogg slid home the third insertion, and the wet of Aymeric's arousal shifted audibly; he was  _ dripping _ , and the stable hand at his hip disappeared for a moment while Nidhogg curled and flexed digits within him, dragging from the depths of Aymeric's chest a desperate keening.

The hand not invading him dipped to press between two thighs, the better to collect just a few pearly drops of Aymeric's arousal; a blunt pressure at his lips and Aymeric parted them unthinkingly, jolting as the sour taste of his own slick met his dutifully questing tongue.

"Noisy," Nidhogg murmured as he pressed two fingers into Aymeric's mouth, the better to keep Aymeric both quiet and occupied while the dragon fucked him close to a second climax.

Mayhap Aymeric should have been afraid, or at the very least concerned, that Nidhogg sought every last flicker of aether from his captive irrespective of the cost to his body and his form, but a warmth at the firmness, the absolute certainty of the dragon's touch upon him, assured him in ways words would not that the limits and the wants and the tells of his hunger were known to Nidhogg by the tie of their aether.

How curious, Aymeric thought (not for the first time), that the dragon preferred to feast on the aether of men—as  _ vengeance _ , he had said, but Aymeric wondered of the connection between Nidhogg's chosen form and that of his  _ prey _ .

Like this, with his back turned, with the hot press of another body to his spine, it was almost simple to pretend that 'twas simply a man working three fingers into Aymeric's entrance—he gasped as Nidhogg crooked them and the slick pads of his digits pressed against a spot that set him to quivering, but his lips did not part far from the fingers in his mouth, tasting of his own arousal and the strange tang of char.

Tiny scales alike to flat pebbles on the bed of a river dotted the pale skin of the dragon's humanoid form, Aymeric noticed, the arch of the back of Nidhogg's hand bared where red-stained plate and leathers did not reach; they glimmered black in the light of the moon that shone through frosted panes and dappled across Aymeric's exposed flesh, and they pressed nicely into him where they split his nethers open. Focusing on that sensation and the heat it stirred in his gut, Aymeric slackened his grip on the back of the chair he clung to for desperate support and allowed Nidhogg to fuck into him with purpose, his tongue laving against studded fingers idly.

Oh, how he wanted  _ more _ . But even the selfish, traitorous craving he held in confidence in the darkest corners of his mind was enough to kindle the shameful want to blazing, and Aymeric reached the second crest he so coveted with a surprised groan, a groan stifled in the girth of Nidhogg's fingers, which rested at the back of his tongue, halfway to punching down his throat.

"There you are," Nidhogg crooned, and the oily softness of his voice, the disparity between tone and intent, even the barest indication of  _ something— _ praise, attachment, desire,  _ fondness— _ drew from Aymeric a sudden peak, stronger than the second, the wrecked noise torn from him little more than a whine as he clenched around and rocked upon the digits that fucked him raw.

Nidhogg's teeth pressed at the lobe of his pointed ear as he chuckled darkly against it, with some private amusement unknown to Aymeric, lost as he was in the throes of his third climax; he might've dragged teeth against the fingers in his mouth, for the laugh turned to a quiet hiss and the intrusions were wrested from the grasp of his lips.

Aymeric thought to whine, but the last fragment of his mind that remained clear despite the heady tension that had thrummed through him in crests and lulls cautioned him against prolonging the encounter; he felt  _ weak,  _ weaker than he had just fresh from the infirmary, and he knew that only rest and prayer would replenish his strength, while permitting the parasitic consumption of his aether would only stretch his reserves thinner.

Regardless of the noise he stifled, however, the dragon behind him heard the intake of breath for what it was; when he withdrew come-slickened fingers from Aymeric's depths, he lifted them to parted lips with a knowing rumble too deep in his chest to be a laugh, and when Aymeric sealed his mouth around them with obedience and eagerness in equal measure, Nidhogg pumped them shallowly into the arch of Aymeric's tongue.

The absence of barbed words was but a superficial observation made in a corner of his mind, a corner that had collected similar details whilst the majority of his faculties had been consumed in rapturous fervor; Aymeric held no great affection for Nidhogg's insults (the fires of conflict they stoked low in his stomach notwithstanding) but the change in the dragon's temperament intrigued him—

A firm, warn pressure on the back of his neck stilled Aymeric in his ministrations.

Nidhogg had set his lips against the meet of Aymeric's shoulders and spine, and the skin there tingled at the contact, and then at the absence of it as he withdrew.

A feather-light touch of a weightless  _ something _ against his shoulder distracted Aymeric's thoughts for a moment, then, from focusing upon the minutiae of sensation…

...but a moment was enough.

Like the moonlight secreted behind a cover of clouds, Nidhogg's presence at his back simply  _ wasn't _ . Aymeric's mouth ached from the stretch and strain of digits that vanished from between his lips, and the patch of skin that had borne Nidhogg's final,  _ uncharacteristic _ gesture felt as though it had been abluted with rose water and blessed with holy magic.

An ironic comparison.

The sticks of incense had burnt low in their stand, ashes piled in a line where they had fallen, unmoved by the disturbance of Aymeric’s second encounter with the wyrm, and he straightened his posture from how it had shifted and bent over the chair he had used to ground and support him, feeling the clicks and jolts of muscles and joints settling back into their proper places.

A bath. He had meant to take one after his prayers, but the untimely interruption had necessitated that he wash himself clean of Nidhogg’s blighted touch afore he invited the Fury’s stern gaze to rest upon him in judgement. As clean as he could, barring the jagged edges of his aether where Nidhogg’s had grasped and torn, had feasted, had _ devoured. _

Such was the lot he had accepted—had  _ welcomed, _ even—and if he felt shame in the doing, it was only for inviting the need for such sacrifice.

He could but hope that the Fury understood his heart.

As Aymeric began the arduous process of shifting from his time-anchored position, the feathery tickle of  _ something _ resting upon his shoulder, moving with his own gesture, pulled his thoughts from the mire of doubt. With one tremulous hand he reached to pluck the offending thing from where it clung to his sweat-slicked and bare skin—

Between two fingers he held a single strand of hair, long, silken, and glinting the same color as the moonlight that split the gloom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dont forget to check me out on [twitter](http://twitter.com/gayprotagonist) for some additional info regarding this project


	3. iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my apologies for the week off of updating; moving took much more out of me than i had anticipated.
> 
> plot heavy chapter but there is some smut for flavor. i am trying to balance the spices
> 
> enjoy your maintenance day snack xoxo

The bracing chill of the early morning breeze bit at exposed flesh and stole down passages of breath like water seeking empty spaces. Though full many of his compeers found morning duties to be unpleasant, he himself had long grown accustomed to the bitter cold that ached bone-deep even in front of a roaring blaze.

Spring in Coerthas had not come for five years. Five years past the lesser moon had been plucked from the firmament, had then hatched like an egg to unshackle the thousand-year fury of a great and terrible dragon. Fire and death had rained down upon all the land, had shaken the very heavens themselves, and the Fury in Her mercy sent dark clouds and steep drifts, snow and ice to stifle the inferno of the very seventh hell itself.

Her grace fell and fell upon the land, to bury Her enemies and those who had averted their gazes from Her both. In Her wisdom She had sent the most absolute of signs:

the winter of the Dragonsong War had come. The final victory was nigh, and soon She would lead her disciples into battle, unto the glory of having completed Her great work.

Aymeric huffed out a breath as he bent over a struggling bush, once-green foliage yellow and curling. The exhale stirred a cluster of snowflakes that had been falling past his cold-bitten nose, sent them spiraling to land upon his heavy woolen cassock, but he paid them no heed, as well-accustomed to the motes of white that darted across his vision as he was.

There was naught he could do for the ailing plant; some were hardier than others, and even those that survived the transplant to the outdoor garden ultimately lost their feeble grip on life when the cold made soft their green stems.

Aymeric plucked what he could of the tea leaves and deposited them in a small earthenware container, to be set aside as the roots of the doomed plant were extricated from the frozen ground. Younger bushes that had survived a fortnight of the elements in pots were next to take up residence in the patch of turned earth, consigning them to their certain death in order to make room for the hardier sprouts generations in the cultivating.

As he gently pressed down the soft earth to secure the fresh plant in place, Aymeric thought a few lines of prayer— _ thought, _ for were he to be witnessed praying over a few stems of  _ mist dill  _ scarce anyone in the abbey would think to take him seriously. It had struck him time and again just how alike this garden was to the front of the Dragonsong War; skilled fighters in their primes felled by claw and flame and sickness, to be replaced with the latest rosy-cheeked recruit, pushed to the front of the line with his shield arm shaking in its straps as a terrible maw stretched wide afore him—

Dreams. Fleeting but frenzied and frequent, aided by the horrible wounds and even more horrible tales brought to the abbey in snatches.

Aymeric had had enough of them to wonder: if he, in another life, had heard the call and given it his answer. If, in another life, his duty had been  _ there _ and not  _ here. _

Yet the time spent wondering was the currency of his charges, not his own to spend.

So Aymeric roused himself from his stiff position, brushed the snow and the dirt from his cassock, collected his meager harvest, and made for the cloister; the pathway that encircled the garden was swept of drifts often, but his every third step precluded the soft crunch of snow and ice as he made his way toward the door to the infirmary.

* * *

  
  
  


An upright figure greeted him upon his arrival, and the shiver that dragged itself down his back was achingly familiar—but upon second glance (he had averted his to check that he had closed the door afore his demon captured the prey it had sought), he realized that the ramie undergarments of a patient hung upon his form.

Aymeric blinked. The knight of House Fortemps looked quite different in the glow of vigor and health; he had been in the middle of pacing the bare floor, it seemed, which Aymeric had interrupted by throwing the door into his path.

“My lord,” Aymeric said with great alarm—when last he had seen the man, he had been yet pallid and grim, eyes closed to the world and the sharp line of his mouth  _ flat  _ and not the winsome grin that split his face at the sight of Aymeric before him—“I am afraid I must ask you to sit.”

Knights of the High Houses were a strange, inconstant lot, filled to the brim with either arrogance or humility, with either kindness or spite, and Aymeric was relieved when Haurchefant did as he was bid without argument. Though he did  _ not  _ do so  _ quietly;  _ as he approached his cot he grasped one of Aymeric’s hands in two of his, a tilt to his silver brows that precluded his words.

“Father,” he began, “am I to understand that you are the one who nursed me back to health?”

Aymeric felt the crinkle upon his forehead that he knew indicated his own brows drew together at the question. He knew not how to answer—he had been with the man just three bells ago, it was true, but he…

Aymeric had been preparing to lay the man to rest if he did not awaken by sundown. He had not merely been sleeping; he had been  _ wasting _ , trapped in a sort of half-death he might never have awakened from.

The archimandrite’s hand was the hand of mercy, be it to grant life or to grant a swift death—and he felt his duty to be sacred.

Yet someone—some _ thing _ —had reversed the course of Haurchefant’s illness as elsewhere Aymeric had prepared himself for the burden of ending a life.

Someone or something that meant to refuse credit for such an action, as if it would simply go  _ unnoticed,  _ as if it would simply be  _ forgotten… _

“I am,” said Aymeric, for the expectant weight of Haurchefant’s gaze won out over the impending enumeration of theories, each more hare-brained than the last. Whoever had done the deed had left the ensuing responsibility to Aymeric, and while he was not overly fond of the idea of taking credit for an act that was not his own, he could at least reason that he had cared for Haurchefant in every other capacity available to him.

That same bright, effusive joy split Haurchefant’s face again, and he—in a gesture Aymeric would ponder for nights to come—seized with callused palms the sides of Aymeric’s face to pull him in for a heavy kiss. No more than the press of mouth against mouth, but so  _ forceful  _ that Aymeric gasped against Haurchefant for the difficulty of drawing in breath.

With a noise of alarm Haurchefant released his grip and took a small step back, looking fit to topple back on the cot for a spell. “My sincere apologies,” the knight said, with the decency to look bashful as he flexed his strong fighter’s hands out of misspent energy. “I meant only to express my,” a pause as their shifting gazes met with chagrin and embarrassment writ plain in each, “ _ deepest  _ thanks. I have heard many a tale of Hemlock Abbey, and… well, suffice it to say,” Haurchefant spoke rather quickly, flustered as he was, but he gave a little laugh just then and Aymeric could not help but smile in response, “I think I’ll have to share my own, as well. Complete with the  _ vision  _ that is the priest who attended me.”

The breath caught in Aymeric’s throat as if it were a bitter tonic, foul and smarting. “P-pardon?”

Haurchefant’s blinding smile turned a little crooked at the edges, aglow with a different humor. “I beg your forgiveness, Father—it seems whatever manner of grievous injury that brought me here knocked my wits about just as well.” The grin fell just as finally and certainly as an icicle shaken from an eave. “About that, pray tell: what happened?”

Aymeric bade Haurchefant sit, and so he sat. Together they discussed the extent of Haurchefant’s wounds and the battle that prompted them; Haurchefant’s memory was quite clear, much clearer than should be expected in the wake of what befell him. He spoke of a fierce conflict on the borders of Dravanian territory, of the preternatural might of the wyverns that hurled themselves against the walls of his garrison.

And he spoke of the murmurings of the astrologians—that the heavens foretold the awakening of a great and terrible wyrm.

With much to ruminate upon Aymeric left Haurchefant alone in his cot, having dispensed an order for bed rest that Haurchefant answered with the sort of smile given when one intends on disobeying said order at the earliest convenience. Had Aymeric greater cause to worry (Haurchefant had passed a rudimentary physical with exceptional marks) he would have extracted from the man an oath to behave, sworn on something of value—his mother’s life, or some such.

Aymeric wondered, not for the first time, whether his mother was still alive.

His was hardly a unique tale; an unwanted child left upon the Fury’s front stoop, begotten by hapless parentage after a night of irresponsibility. Yet while the identity of his sire was known to him, had been known to him since he grew old enough to understand the whispers traded over his head, not a whit had been spoken of the woman who had birthed him—but for one particularly cruel conjecture, made as a slight against Aymeric's honor.

That his father had had her killed.

He was not a fool. He knew that Thordan was not a kind man. But Aymeric believed him to be a  _ good  _ man, a just man—a man that walked in the Fury’s grace and spoke with Her blessing.

Aymeric fancied himself a man of conviction. He possessed precious little, and as would a jealous pauper he took frequent stock of them; unlike all manner of worldly things, he held faith in abundance. Faith in the wisdom of the Fury and in Her disciples.

Men much holier than he held fast to the claim that the endless winter that reigned over Coerthas was a sign from the very heavens themselves that victory was near. That a lasting superiority would be claimed over the Dravanians; that their fell magicks and terrible illusions grew feeble and dim. Upon the fall of the lesser moon the realm had borne witness to the destruction wrought by the elder wyrm within, that had clawed free of its prison as a hatchling would an egg; yet its disappearance amid a haze of half-recalled memory revealed itself to some as the will and the work of the Fury, who had seen fit to grant succor to Her faithful, to dispel whatever Dravanian enchantment had afflicted them so—had muddled their vision and enthralled their minds and bade them endure the great wyrm's rancor.

Men much holier than he held fast to the conviction that the winter of the Dragonsong War was upon them, and that the devastation of the Calamity was naught but the last desperate railings of a cornered beast.

And as for Aymeric?

He had learned long ago that a man could subsist on faith alone for lack of bread.

* * *

  
  
  


His chamber door closed heavily behind him, but Aymeric did not relax until he had confirmed that he was alone in his quarters, that there was no malicious and seductive presence awaiting the complaisance of its prey.

When he had sought out every cranny and contented himself with his appraisal, he settled on the edge of his bed and sighed, a long, deep, tragic thing that seemed to pour out of the chasm of his chest without end; days' worth of caution and vigilance and fatigue folded over and into each other until he could no longer discern where one ended and another began. Days of the conspicuous absence of his lurking shadow, of the dark that waited at the edge of the light.

Three times the sun had risen since Nidhogg had  _ consumed  _ him, in many ways, not least of which being the inexorable undercurrent of the  _ concept  _ of him in Aymeric’s mind, the subject to which Aymeric returned again and again. Three times the sun had risen to set aglow the abbey the fell dragon had chosen to haunt, yet refused to grace with his presence. Three times the sun had risen and fallen across Aymeric’s upturned face in colored and dappled patterns as he secluded himself in fervent prayer for bells at a time.

If nothing else, he thought, as he lay back upon his made sheets without bothering to disrobe (he had meant at the first only to freshen up before returning to prayers), his mind felt  _ clear.  _ He felt the gaze of the Fury upon him once more, felt Her caution and Her wisdom mirrored in the clarity of his thought and the certainty of his purpose.

Within the solitude of prayer and meditation, he had charted his course.

If Nidhogg meant to use him, then let Aymeric be used.

In turn, Aymeric would use him.

He would gain from Nidhogg knowledge of his enemy, knowledge coveted by the Temple Knights and the Holy See. Knowledge gifted only to heretics who betrayed the Fury in both head and heart. Knowledge that would serve men, that would save the lives of Her faithful when employed in their defense.

_ Knowledge,  _ a part of his mind murmured, near to wholly unheard,  _ that would gain him the recognition of the Church. _

The Fury was not omnipotent. The march of the Dragonsong War resisted Her influence; yet he had found himself in a position to exert Her will in defense of Her faithful, and Aymeric could not help but to believe that he had been granted Her favor by virtue of the circumstances he found himself within and the guidance to which he had hearkened.

As Aymeric lay upon his bed, stretching the curvature of his spine that had labored in poor posture as he lost himself in prayer and meditation, the rays of the evening sun began to fade and vanish behind the reaching peaks of the Slate Mountains. It was not in his nature to laze about, but though he had done little work of exertion in the past few days, the sorry state of his aether would take yet more time to heal and to replenish.

More like than not it was the repeated  _ feeding  _ that had ruined him so thoroughly, and his ruination that had begotten the wyrm's silence; if Nidhogg remained true to his word (and while Aymeric had no reason to believe he would not, he still found putting his trust in a dragon inadvisable at the very least), Aymeric would remain his only prey at the abbey, though such an oath guaranteed naught of the safety of nearby settlements. To wit, ‘twas entirely plausible that the wyrm stalked other grounds yet unspoiled while the archimandrite recovered.

His thoughts settled then upon the matter of his charge’s miraculous recovery; Aymeric’s aether had been all but spent in tethering the man yet to life, and that he had not only awakened but stood and walked…

The Fury worked miracles.

Aymeric could little doubt that the arbiter of  _ this  _ miracle would spit upon Her grace.

He did not know for what reason Nidhogg might have intervened, but the caution of providence uncertain could not temper the archimandrite’s gratitude. None other but  _ he _ could have done such a thing; none other but Aymeric could have saved the man in the first place.

Be it with his stolen aether or no, Nidhogg had chosen this course.

And where might this course take them?

Aymeric worried his lower lip between teeth as he contemplated the temperatures of Nidhogg’s apparently mercurial mood. When next he came to  _ feed,  _ would he treat Aymeric the thief? Demand he offer recompense, or the favor he now owed? Take from him yet  _ more, more  _ than he had in their previous encounters?

The rustle of shifting fabric.

Or would his mouth linger upon Aymeric’s flesh as it had at the last? The empty facsimiles of intimacy, so near to what Aymeric had lacked, had sought all his life, near enough that he could so easily  _ pretend,  _ that he could shut his eyes away from the truth of the matter, could  _ take  _ and  _ use  _ just as Nidhogg  _ took  _ and  _ used  _ him…

Another rustle. Aymeric felt too large for his robes, too warm, and the woven fibers chafed at his skin, so with hands too conscious to be idle the archimandrite undid the clasp at the neck of his cassock, dragged his fingers against rough soot-dyed wool to open a button, and then another, and then another, until the breast of the garment lay open to expose the pale ramie of his smalls, the modest curves of his chest under them.

(He neither revered nor reviled the shape and size of his breasts. They were of him as surely as his hands or his voice, and were the latter mezzo and not baritone, ‘twould have changed naught; for in Ishgard a man is a man if he desires it so.)

Whether it was to be charitable or damnable, Aymeric knew with certainty that Nidhogg would return to the abbey, and with his blighted touch he would brand Aymeric once more, set him alight with desires so foreign they could only be of the wyrm’s own making. He could easily recall, if he wanted, the way the fire had risen in him, fallen in him, from the flush dusting his cheeks and neck and chest down to the bolt of arousal that had him growing slick, thinking of the ways Nidhogg had  _ penetrated  _ him, the craving that penetration had awoken—to feel  _ filled,  _ to feel stretched open and defiled and possessed, like something coveted, like a thing worthy of being wanted.

He was  _ warm,  _ and he realized what he was doing when he relaxed his hands from the cupping and rolling of his clothed breasts.

It burned in him, less of an insatiable inferno and more the smouldering coals of a want he had yet to admit.

He had meant not to take his own pleasure—but if he was to  _ use  _ just as he allowed himself to  _ be used… _

Aymeric gasped. His fingers were colder than he expected when they alighted upon the bare buds of his breasts; he had hiked up the hem of the ramie shirt to grip them as he imagined Nidhogg might, with claiming force, and the touch of chilled digits evoked the memory of clawed gauntlets pressing into soft flesh.

How might Nidhogg claim him next? Aymeric dragged pads upon stiffening nubs as he contemplated the wyrm’s strong hands on them. And that mouth… The bruises Nidhogg had sucked into pale skin had all but faded entirely, and Aymeric craved to be marked again, to be debased, to bear reminders of the blighted pact he had sworn himself to, that he had  _ embraced  _ not only for how it had benefited others, but for how it  _ served him. _

What was there to say that the prize Nidhogg sought from Aymeric could not be claimed from  _ under  _ him? Would the wyrm deny him the initiative, should he wish to take it, even though it served their mutual benefit? Would Nidhogg consent to being bound, being driven to his knees, Aymeric’s grip tight upon the wicked horns that curved from the wyrm’s helm as he  _ took _ and  _ took,  _ as he spread his thighs and bucked against the curve of Nidhogg’s mouth upon him almost in supplication—

Aymeric’s hand had delved down, down his front, under the portion of the cassock that remained fastened, under the hem of his smallclothes, and he  _ moaned  _ when his fingers came upon the wetness that had gathered between his legs; slick folds parted easily for his questing touch, dwelling in the memory of Nidhogg’s fingers—for he had never  _ touched himself  _ before and the pleasure Nidhogg had wrung from him with the crooking of scaled digits served as his only guide—as he teased tentatively at the nub at the apex of his entrance.

The memory of Nidhogg’s sweet croon came to him then, unbidden, and Aymeric shivered as the words twisted in his mind, as though he could hear Nidhogg at this very moment:  _ insatiable thing,  _ the wyrm chastised in Aymeric’s imagination, and he gasped as he pressed a finger to his clit, gently rubbed and stroked there with the aid of his own arousal.

_ So brazen,  _ the wyrm in his mind spoke, and Aymeric swallowed down another moan; shame blazed through him, dusted his cheeks to the tips of his ears (judging by the heat that prickled across his skin).  _ Mean you to finish to the thought of me, too eager even to disrobe? _

Yes, Aymeric thought. He meant to master his own pleasure, to take back from the wyrm some of its power over him; he meant to master himself—

_ Liar. _

Aymeric bucked at the velvet slide of the voice, so vivid that Nidhogg might as well have been breathing into his ear.

_ You  _ crave.  _ You hunger with a ferocity overwhelming. _

_ Slake your thirst as I do mine, little priest. _

Aymeric sank his teeth into his lower lip to keep from crying out as a finger breached his entrance. The flutter of the slick, wet ridges of his channel drove his flush deeper, the fire licking his skin and immolating him from the inside out; he felt  _ exposed, indecent  _ despite the layers of clothing that hid the extent of his ministrations.

The thrill of shame sent him yet higher, and he imagined Nidhogg’s breath against his neck as he worked a second finger into himself, reveling in the forbidden sensation.

He  _ hungered  _ for Nidhogg within him, and entranced by the exploration upon which he had embarked, he forgot to rationalize that hunger. He forgot to offer himself an explanation for the burning desire that coiled low in his belly, too occupied with the feeling of  _ rawness  _ the working of two fingers inside himself evoked, as though he had laid bare more in solely his own presence than Nidhogg had coveted and coaxed and  _ taken _ .

‘Twas a sight less damning to be taken on a ritual altar than it was to dwell in the memory consumed with heady want—want for Nidhogg to do it again, to  _ continue,  _ to spread Aymeric’s thighs and spear him with his terribly draconic  _ length, oh,  _ to imagine it splitting him wide Aymeric’s lips parted in a gasp and he worked a thumb over his clit, taken by  _ want, want, want  _ for Nidhogg to lay him down and  _ fuck  _ him, to pin Aymeric under wicked claws and flare his dark wings as he  _ ruined  _ him, tainted him,  _ enthralled him— _

Aymeric peaked with a desperate whine that tore from his throat without his consent, one that rang out in the silent air of his quarters, and on instinct he pressed his fingers yet deeper even as his channel squeezed and rippled around them; the delicious stretch and burn heightened his pleasure and he found himself arching off the bed, the changed angle setting off sparks behind his eyelids like the aborted flickers of dragon breath.

As the heave of his quickened breath subsided, the touch and press of his fingers quickly grew painful, and Aymeric carefully withdrew his hand, with a soft exhale given as he emptied himself.

The memory struck him—of Nidhogg coaxing arousal-slickened fingers into his mouth—and with hesitation so little and weak as to be nearly nonexistent he raised his hand and wrapped his lips about his slick digits, tongue laving between them to search out every last drop of his own taste; the fire of obedience had kindled to roaring within him even if the wyrm was conspicuously absent, and mayhap that was telling of just who demanded it of him.

Thus was his frustrated hunger sated, and Aymeric lay back upon his sheets, waiting patiently for the return of his rational mind to inflict upon him the guilt and shame that so surely approached. Yet no matter how he waited, the criticism refused to attend him; the sun had sunk low beyond the horizon, the sky only distant blues behind the perpetual snowclouds, afore Aymeric felt the twinge of concern, quite different from what he expected:

What becomes of a priest whose heart does not repent?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consider this chapter free. we return to our regularly scheduled "check my twitter for the info i can't put here" cr0wdfvnd programming after chapter 4. love u


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didnt proof this so if its terrible its your problem now.
> 
> come as aphrodisiac is just a really good trope and im allowed to do what i want
> 
> enjoy xoxo

The air was thick with haze, like holy cedar-scented smoke begotten of dragon-fire. Where light pervaded it was the vermilion hue of candles and oil lamps, suffusing the room in a warm glow that danced along the shadows cast by shelves and stacks and turning pages.

Aymeric was not wont to spend long in this room, with its stagnant air and crypt-like stillness; when he had need of the wisdom of his forebears he came to collect it and then to partake of it elsewhere, whether in the many spaces set aside for reflection throughout the abbey or—before the lesser moon had been plucked from the heavens, before the endless snows came upon the lands—mayhap within the cloister garden, wherein bloomed many clusters of Furysblood, throated flowers of a wild crimson hue.

Beneath the blowing drifts they still stood tall, but the conditions were not otherwise amenable to poring over old and yellowed parchment, so Aymeric remained indoors with the trappings of the abbey library. And in this specific instance he remained within the library itself, blessed holy cedar incense rich in his nose, at a reading desk quite hidden between bookshelves.

The room was small, and he was alone. Both suited his purposes well; for he had collected a half-dozen sheaves of tied-together parchment, journals of chirurgeons and chaplains dated for a time when his father held sway as Very Reverend Archimandrite, and Aymeric feared he could not conjure a suitable explanation of his task that did not betray the traitorous stirrings of his heart.

The wyrm’s venomous growls yet rang in his ears, even while his blood heated and raced. Whatever it was for which Nidhogg meant to revenge himself upon Thordan, Aymeric had found no telling in the annals of Thordan’s works, which he had nearly committed to memory for the time he had spent reading and rereading his father’s wisdom over the last ten years.

A decade. A  _ decade  _ since his father had appointed him archimandrite and departed himself for the city, for a seat on a higher dais. The wyrm had been ten years too late in his reckoning.

Had he been locked in slumber, as the elder wyrms slept, for decades and centuries at a time?

Aymeric set aside the journal that currently occupied his attention, and rested his back against the spine of the chair, hands clasping in his lap as he descended into the yawning chasm of thought and speculation.

Truly, he knew little and less of the dragon he had…  _ bedded,  _ too often and with too much familiarity to name it differently. Only his name, which had proven ineffective as a means of gleaning further knowledge, absent as it was from the tales of dragons of eld.

Hraesvelgr, the dragon that all Coerthan children were taught to fear, loomed as a murderous specter over the history of the Dragonsong War. All else was brushed aside by his single-minded fury, rekindled by every awakening. While he slept, Ishgard rebuilt, and upon his rousing did the city brace for another era under siege.

Whilst the dread wyrm slumbered, his brood ravaged countrysides and slaughtered villagers; the commanders of his horde were his scions, foremost among their siblings in both resilience and hatred. Of their number, Nidhogg was not, for Aymeric knew well of the bloody swathes they had carved through Halonic history and Ishgardian legacy.

Nor did the journals he perused make mention of Nidhogg by name, or even of a dragon in passing—only of  _ demonstrations,  _ a word which might not have piqued his interest if not for the certainty that Nidhogg had indeed been wronged by Aymeric’s father as he so claimed.

He did not  _ trust.  _ He simply believed that the wyrm held no reason to employ dishonesty, with so many other tools at his disposal.

Aymeric’s attention was drawn from his task by…  _ something.  _ Perhaps a movement or a sound; he could not say for certain what instinct drew him to the sill of the library’s singular narrow window, outside which a clear night had fallen, the constellation of the Spear, a reminder of Halone’s everlasting tenacity, twinkling overhead. The stars burned cold and gazing upon them Aymeric could not help but feel  _ watched, witnessed,  _ looked upon with stern judgement, and he drew a thin ramie curtain over the slit in the wall before he returned to his work.

As he pivoted upon a heel, he was driven to a halt by the bolt of icy surprise that lanced through him, seeing the armored figure that had just turned to slide the lock home, to trap them together in this small and stifling room. Twisted and malicious crimson plate seamed together into a silhouette he saw behind the lids of his eyes too often to count, but the helmet was conspicuously absent; instead silvery-white locks, the color of moonbeams spun into silk, drifted down his shoulders in a gnarled mess that did naught to diminish their beauty.

“What is it you seek, little priest?” Nidhogg asked the silence before he turned, the rasp of his voice filling the air with the tang of copper.

Aymeric’s breath caught as the wyrm’s—the  _ man’s _ —face halted in stony profile.

He was  _ beautiful. _

Harsh veins of glimmering red, pulsing with violent aether, only highlighted gaunt hollows and black-rimmed eyes, high cheekbones and the strong, pale jaw that seemed to clench under Aymeric’s attention despite having so willfully invited it.

He was beautiful, and Aymeric knew with a certainty he could not explain that Nidhogg had not crafted such a form by whim and imagination; for being in possession of such a face to bear to the object of his obsession, to the archimandrite he had  _ seduced,  _ and choosing to hide it with mail and magicks spoke to Aymeric of a gross ignorance as to the tool Nidhogg held in his possession.

His thoughts churned as water brought to boil with such a singular revelation, and Aymeric realized he had lost the thread of the conversation Nidhogg had meant to begin when the latter turned fully to him and crossed his plated and leathered arms.

“Answer.”

Aymeric tore his eyes from the monster’s own, glowing with that same ruby aether as they were, and glanced down to piles of parchments that had collected upon the desk, the better to collect his thoughts.

“Understanding,” the priest said at last, moving the most recent sheaf of parchment aside to place it upon an ever-growing stack: the journals that mentioned experiments, demonstrations, rather circuitous language he could not translate until he had happened upon the rosetta stone he required to make sense of them. Though he had not yet found it, he could only believe that it existed somewhere in this archive. It  _ must. _

“Passing strange,” Nidhogg said, his mouth seeming to linger upon every sibilant sound, “that Thordan’s son should desire such.”

If such a statement was intended to rouse ire, a heated anger, an impassioned rebuttal, it had rather the opposite effect; Aymeric stood straighter under the wyrm’s slings and arrows, his shoulders set, a careful coolness about his voice as he answered the challenge set before him.

“‘Tis my belief,” he said, meeting and holding the bloodied stare leveled in return, “that it is the son’s solemn duty to learn from his father’s folly. I am the inheritor of his legacy, and I would know wherefore you pursue vengeance upon him.”

Nidhogg regarded Aymeric’s petition in silence, his hateful gaze roving the planes of the archimandrite’s face in search of hesitation… or perhaps in search of antipathy, begotten of a foregone conclusion, an expression representative of duplicity within Aymeric’s heart.

He would not find it. For in his pursuance of the truth Aymeric had begun to wonder if Nidhogg’s justice was itself ordained by the Fury.

Aymeric had believed his father a holy man, if not a good one. Yet Halone suffered this wyrm to plot against him, and suffered Her faithful to be complicit in the endeavor. What might be the purpose, if Her will and the dragon’s were not the very same? What choice remained to Aymeric but to divine the source of such a singular intent, to attempt to understand the injustice done to Nidhogg?

Had Thordan not done Aymeric himself the selfsame injustice, in leaving his progeny to bear the consequences of his actions?

“Hm.”

Nidhogg’s thoughtful noise paired with a softening of the anger that stewed beneath his—no, his stolen vessel’s—features. ‘Twas only apparent in the release of tension in his jaw and the corners of his eyes, but Aymeric felt the change significant; enough for Nidhogg to unfold his arms and take a step forward, and then another, sabatons clanking on the old stone floor, afore they stood eye to eye beside the desk Aymeric had claimed for his fevered searching.

Before Aymeric’s eyes had fallen upon the slopes of Nidhogg’s Elezen visage he could have sworn the wyrm towered a fulm or more above him. Now it was hardly a few ilms, and Aymeric wondered at the change; had the armor been bereft of flesh until this very moment? Mayhap—

“Show me then, pet,” Nidhogg spoke, raising a gauntleted hand—scaled fingers hidden in plate but cold metal claws at their tips nonetheless—to seize Aymeric’s chin with a touch too fierce, too heavy to be tender. “Show me the strength of your will.”

At such a command, what could he do but obey?

‘Twas ground untrodden upon which he threatened to stumble, but Aymeric was not wanting for enthusiasm, and the pliant answer of Nidhogg’s lips beneath the eager press of his own was affirmation enough that Nidhogg's hunger was alike to his own.

The dragon  _ yielded  _ to him, and that knowledge itself kindled the smouldering coals of Aymeric's desire to blazing.

He had imagined this scene, but no turn of his thoughts, no matter how filthy, how sordid, could do justice to how Nidhogg's flesh sang with impossible warmth beneath Aymeric's palms, how a core of iron beneath the wyrm's skin rebuffed the press of Aymeric's thumbs into the hollows of Nidhogg's throat, how the clawed tips of Nidhogg's gauntlets pricked at Aymeric's scalp too light to draw blood as they carded through Aymeric's locks and tangled in them to hold him closer.

Mayhap he had made the choice himself, or mayhap Nidhogg had guided their entwined forms with the press of hands and the tug of aether, but Nidhogg's hips halted against the edge of the reading desk and there Aymeric pulled at snarled silvern locks, relishing in the way Nidhogg's lips parted to admit the questing tip of Aymeric's eager tongue.

_ Mine _ , Aymeric thought at the now-familiar taste of char that greeted him, at the hot and heady press of Nidhogg's forked tongue against his own, at the graze of sharp fangs against his lip as a reminder of the monster he sought to claim. And at the thought he could not so much as feign surprise; when he had countenanced the idea of Nidhogg  _ stalking other grounds _ he had felt a burning low in his chest that he pretended in futility was not a  _ possessiveness _ . As a man of little means he was, as any pauper, given to guarding his meager possessions with a ferocious jealousy—whether they bane or boon, coveted or loathed.

Whether Nidhogg would cause him untold suffering as recompense for unholy rapture, Aymeric had chosen his path; he would take as the wyrm took from him, and to hells with the consequences.

Nidhogg arched against him as Aymeric tugged hard at knotted strands, and the rush of wringing pleasure from the wyrm's accursed form drove Aymeric to an even greater height of hunger, such that he parted from the heated kiss to drag his mouth down the scaled column of Nidhogg's throat, pressing teeth against the ridges of ink and char and nipping at exposed, pale flesh none-too-gently until crimson bloomed between pebbles of ebony.

Nidhogg  _ rumbled _ , then, a sound too low and deep and sooty to be a laugh, and the prick of claws at his scalp as the wyrm  _ pulled  _ drew from the depths of Aymeric's throat a reedy moan.

"More," the wyrm demanded, and the knowledge that he took pleasure from Aymeric's ministrations, from his blind and clumsy hunger, both startled the archimandrite and spurred him on further such that he lost track of what it was he had been meaning to do  _ (what was it that he had been meaning to…?)  _ and instead went to his knees before Nidhogg in a gesture that was, to him, as easy as breathing.

Yet rather than bow his head in supplication Aymeric reached to fumble with stained and worn fastenings between plates of crimson armor, and Nidhogg watched appraisingly as Aymeric freed the laces of the dragon's smalls from the confines of his mail, wrenched them loose and revealed a greater and greater expanse of scarred skin and scales.

At each ilm of flesh exposed Aymeric expected to feel the ridge of Nidhogg's length against the fingers that coaxed the hem of cloth down and down, but at the base of Nidhogg's pelvis Aymeric discovered instead a parting of skin altogether unlike his own folds. At his hesitance Nidhogg fisted his claws in Aymeric's hair and pulled, and with a moan Aymeric pressed close and mouthed against the vent, taken by the want to please, by the want to cause Nidhogg pleasure, by the want to touch and explore and  _ claim… _

The entrance was wide and shallow and wet with a strange slick that exploded in salt and sour across Aymeric's tongue, and where any rational man would have felt concern and mayhap even disgust at the inhuman nature of Nidhogg's form Aymeric burned with a ravening  _ curiosity _ , such that he settled his hands upon ridges of Nidhogg's greaves and arched to lave deeper, all the while Nidhogg guiding him with a firm grip upon raven-black locks.

Something  _ shifted _ against the searching press of the tip of Aymeric's tongue, and he withdrew to watch as his labours bore fruit he had not known to expect; scarce an ilm from his mouth the tapered tip of Nidhogg's  _ length _ had begun to protrude from the vent, and a heady anticipation seared through Aymeric at the sudden certainty that it was to be coaxed free of Nidhogg by the wyrm's arousal.

Even as Aymeric moved to part Nidhogg's entrance with his fingers, the better for the hot flat pressure of his tongue to reach every space as Nidhogg's cock swelled under his ministrations, a second push against the jut of his chin wrenched a gasp from deep in his chest in unbridled surprise.  _ Its twin  _ stirred to wakefulness, yet soft with its dormancy, wet to  _ dripping  _ with the wyrm's arousal, and Aymeric could not have stopped himself had he the want to try.

The slender, tapered head of the wyrm's second cock fit neatly between his lips, rimmed by a sharp ridge that was echoed upon the gently swelling shaft, and bidden only by that burning curiosity Aymeric reached to take hold of Nidhogg’s other slickened arousal, canting fingertips against ichor-black scales that throbbed with sinful heat.

“Good,” Nidhogg murmured, and heat coiled low in Aymeric’s belly at the wyrm’s approval; he had been following merely instinct afore now, the cartography of Nidhogg’s unfamiliar flesh a burden to surmount in its own right, but with the weight of one cock in his mouth and the other swelling between his fingers, with the salt-sour taste of Nidhogg’s precome quickly becoming familiar and then  _ pleasant,  _ Aymeric found his want kindling to an unbearable inferno, and thereafter seeking his pleasure seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Aymeric tongued at the slit of the lower of the pair whilst he gripped the upper in a loose fist and stroked, reveling in the wet and heavy slick that leaked from Nidhogg’s vent and made his task all the simpler; his knees were growing cold from the seeping chill of the stone, but he hungered too strongly to care. All that mattered to him presently was proof of Nidhogg’s acquiescence, proof that he knew would be demonstrated in the form of the dragon’s come.

The archimandrite opened his eyes, forced them to focus (a difficult task when he craved only to kneel and to service), dragging his slickened hand against the thickening length; halfway to its root his fingers suddenly failed to meet around its girth, and the ridges and thick bands of scales only widened further until they hilted at the join, which by now had come free of Nidhogg’s opening.

Aymeric’s fingers alighted there, whilst only that tapered tip had entered his mouth, and at the touch upon such sensitive and heated flesh Nidhogg growled and  _ pulled,  _ forcing Aymeric’s mouth deeper upon him, forcing ridge after ridge to pass the tight grip of Aymeric’s lips, sinking into him with a guttural noise. He himself could not help but to moan at the wyrm’s demand, and Aymeric could only brace for the shove of hips as Nidhogg fucked even deeper into his mouth. His jaw  _ ached  _ with the angle and the size of Nidhogg’s cock, and instinctively his tongue bowed and his cheeks hollowed, the better to  _ suck,  _ the better to taste more of the dragon he allowed to defile him. For he craved it: he craved the spill of Nidhogg’s seed, the taste and weight of it upon his tongue, the confession that in some capacity the wyrm had found Aymeric  _ worthy,  _ to reward him with the slaking of the thirst Nidhogg had bid him discover.

The dragon’s precome grew sweeter to the taste and Aymeric moaned as it was fucked into his mouth, at the sinful, wet sounds of Nidhogg’s cock working out of and then into his lips again; obediently he bobbed his head upon the length whilst upon the other his fingers worked, his thumb teasing the weeping slit. He  _ wanted;  _ he had splayed his knees and spread his thighs upon the floor, unable to quell the heat building and building between his folds.

He wanted Nidhogg to come in his mouth and then fuck him upon the desk, he wanted Nidhogg to use him, to  _ break  _ him, he wanted, he  _ wanted.  _ Whatever effect the taste of the wyrm had had upon him merely made apparent and unavoidable the truth—that he wanted to be ruined, to be defiled, to be wanted, to be  _ possessed. _

Aymeric’s eyes pricked with moisture from the strain of his jaw when he forced them open, when he looked up at Nidhogg who fucked his face without remorse, and where he had imagined the wyrm’s impassive countenance instead he was met with an expression so unexpected he  _ whined  _ at the sight, at Nidhogg’s lips parted in open pleasure, and the vibration of the noise against Nidhogg’s pulsing length was the final sensation his coiling lust required to snap.

Nidhogg had braced himself upon the desk with the free hand he was not using to first  _ demand  _ and then  _ guide  _ the rhythm of the archimandrite’s wet lips and tongue and mouth upon him, but that hand flew up to his face, there to muffle the noise of release Aymeric himself had wrenched from him; that sight and knowledge was itself euphoric, but both of Nidhogg’s cocks throbbed and shuddered before his release spilled forth from each,  _ thick  _ and  _ hot  _ upon Aymeric’s palm and within his mouth.

He could not place the taste but he knew it to be  _ divine;  _ his throat worked with eagerness to swallow every last drop of Nidhogg’s come, and urged on by whatever magic made him as  _ sensitive  _ and  _ hungry  _ as he was, Aymeric came untouched, his thighs quaking with the effort of keeping him upright when he felt  _ molten  _ with desire.

_ It was not enough. _

Blindly he was aware of his tongue pressed between the valleys of his palm, seeking every trace of Nidhogg’s essence that had spilled upon it, when Nidhogg crooned and ran those clawed gauntlets against his scalp.

Aymeric could not help but press into the touch, to  _ arch; _ he  _ needed  _ it, needed Nidhogg upon him and  _ within  _ him, ruining him, defiling him, tainting him; if it was this hunger that so motivated heretics Aymeric  _ understood  _ and he barely had the sense to register that he  _ should  _ feel shame, much less to conjure it appropriately—

Nidhogg’s hand upon his cheek, Nidhogg  _ knelt  _ before him, and Aymeric whimpered at the press of the wyrm’s mouth to his; he needed  _ more,  _ he needed to feel…

Feel…

“There,” Nidhogg said, his forehead against Aymeric’s in a hollow facsimile of tenderness too gentle to evoke Aymeric’s disbelief, and Aymeric remembered to breathe, a fumbling and stuttering inhalation taken just shy of the wyrm’s kiss-swollen lips.

His insatiable  _ lust  _ had been quieted, and where every ilm of Aymeric’s skin had been lit afire by it the cold now prickled, grounding him, situating him within himself. Aymeric swallowed, his throat raw and burning, and though he opened his mouth to speak only a pathetic rasp escaped him.

“I accept your petition,” Nidhogg said, and if Aymeric had not the sense the wyrm had seen fit to restore to him he would have thought Nidhogg  _ pleased  _ to say it. As it was he was deeply thankful that his… ministrations… had been enough to sway the wyrm. Regardless of the warring emotions within his breast as to the  _ specifics  _ of what had occurred, he had accomplished his initial endeavor… save for perhaps the dampness of his smalls, as he had not disrobed in the slightest afore  _ servicing  _ Nidhogg as he had.

“You will have the knowledge you seek,” Nidhogg promised, and Aymeric could not help but immerse himself in ruby-glowing eyes that felt  _ warm  _ upon him now rather than hateful. A crimson-knuckled gauntlet stroked at the curve of Aymeric’s cheek, and he held carefully still, even as the gesture brought a pressure to his throat that threatened to make him gasp for his breath. “But not here.

“Seek me at the altar tomorrow night, when the moon has reached its zenith. I would know your desire to be more than passing fancy.”

The wyrm leaned forward to press lips to Aymeric’s own, and the archimandrite’s eyes closed obediently, his heart thrumming uneven in his breast at the turn of Nidhogg’s mood.

Yet when next he opened them, his dragon was gone—naught remained in his wake but the lingering scent of smoke and the lingering sensation of a mouth against his, the phantom weight fading as fast as any dream.


	5. v

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i did not intend to take almost two months on this chapter; life kicked my ass in various forms, not least of which being in forcing me to reevaluate my direction at least twelve times
> 
> that said i didnt proof this so if it's bad im sorry i just cant sit on it any longer
> 
> enjoy xoxo
> 
> (i hope)

Soot.

Copper and soot. Fire and blood.

The tastes were thick in the back of Aymeric’s mouth as Nidhogg made of him his plaything, as he seized his bare waist in a grip that branded him, as his tongue coiled and pressed into every _ilm_ of his mouth as if the dragon meant to fuck him as thoroughly as he had upon the altar, and his knees quaked at the fervor with which Nidhogg lay claim to him.

Callused hands with warm, clawed fingers pressed into fragile skin just shy of bruising and the last of Aymeric’s control shattered at the low growl that resonated in Nidhogg’s chest; he arched into Nidhogg, pressing bare skin to pebbled scales, _moaning_ as his breasts dragged against the texture of scales rising and falling under and over planes of too-warm flesh.

Aymeric’s hands _sought;_ he touched and explored taut and corded muscle, the strong arms and shoulders that had borne plate for so long. He raked his nails against the ridges of Nidhogg’s spine, ridges too pronounced to be fully Elezen, splayed the tips of his fingers at the hollows above the curve of his rear, reveling in the catch of the wyrm’s breath, even the barest response a victory.

Yet he craved _more._ He craved Nidhogg _beneath_ him, that silvery hair a tangle in Aymeric’s fist and the veinlike ley lines of aether that embroidered his skin glowing ruby with hunger. He craved to _take,_ to _possess_ , to _control,_ to ride Nidhogg’s tongue until he had had his fill, to make of Nidhogg a wanton mess near _begging_ for relief, for _mercy,_ even if only evident in his gasping and straining.

With Nidhogg’s tongue still thick in his mouth he moaned around it at the thought; his eyes fluttered open unthinkingly—and gasped at the enormous gaze upon his, crimson slit-pupiled rage and hunger, unmoored in the gloom beyond Nidhogg’s shoulder.

(He ought to wonder where he was, but sight and sensation had grown to encompass his full attention, overwhelming in immediacy and intensity. He could not _think,_ not even to wonder at how he had gotten here, what he last recalled; in the eternal _now_ of touch and feeling and taste and _hunger—always the hunger—_ such things hardly mattered _._ )

A rumble, so deep in pitch that it was felt in the resonance of his limbs more than it was heard. Like thunder, as if he stood within the stormclouds. Yet though it was alike it was assuredly _not;_ he knew the sound and had feared to hear it since before he could rightly remember.

The lungs and cords to produce such a growl were surely beyond his reckoning and Aymeric tensed in the grip of harsh hands and an unyielding mouth, drawing his arms from between their entwined bodies and putting his palms to Nidhogg’s shoulders as if meaning to push him away, to fight free—

The fear in him turned to syrupy acquiescence. His thoughts moved like molasses but his limbs relaxed unbidden; his mouth, pliant once more, surrendered itself to Nidhogg even as that haunting red-eyed gaze yet watched.

He should mean to flee, he felt. He _should._ But warmth prickled across his flesh clear to the tips of his ears at the realization: he did not _want_ to. Whether by his own inclination or the wyrm's will imposed upon his own—and _which_ it was hardly mattered, for even though his flesh yielded 'twas only by his _consent_ that it did. Shoulds, oughts, musts; he had no want for them, no want for thought or pondering or choice. Only for the rapturous oblivion the press of Nidhogg's will, all-encompassing and weighty, promised to him.

So entranced, the touch and glide of bare fingertips against the curves of his shoulders and back went nearly unnoticed. Sensation hovered at the edge of his mind, just shy of the scope of his attention; the natural warmth of flesh so wholly Elezen, so devoid of the possessive want that pervaded Nidhogg's every touch, every action, was—

Was immaterial. Nigh _empty_ of that consuming hunger that so drove him to seek the wyrm again and again.

Elezen hands he did not recognize dipped to caress the valleys of his waist and he did not _care_ with Nidhogg's mouth upon his, Nidhogg's attention upon him, Nidhogg, _Nidhogg—_

His hair in Nidhogg's fist tangled, a _wrench,_ greedy fangs dragging at his jugular contrasting with gentle nips at the back of his neck, another mouth, thin lips spread wide to feather kisses—

Haurchefant's palms rose to tug at Aymeric's pebbled nipples and he moaned because Nidhogg _made_ him, the wyrm all around him and _within_ him, soul-deep like faith, like holiness, staining his very aether crimson as it was set alight with something stronger than want, than need.

 _Mine_.

Not so much a thought as a sensation, a _certainty_ , the weight of Nidhogg's hands and mouth on his skin mirrored and echoed as if 'twas his own flesh doing the touching, as if Aymeric's teeth quested at the curve of his own neck, as if it was his hand that reached and ensnared and twisted in silvern locks, polished steel rather than moonlight spun, a tug and a snarl…

When Nidhogg kissed Haurchefant over the slope of Aymeric's bite-reddened shoulder it was all teeth, a stab and a riposte, claiming heat set against worshipful warmth, and Aymeric could taste Haurchefant's surrender wrought from the knight as if he kissed with the wyrm's devouring tongue.

Though he remained yet himself, a mortal creature of fallible flesh, in this sudden moment—Haurchefant’s angular chest pressed to Aymeric’s back as the wyrm struck his claim on another—he knew himself to be _changed._ To have been tainted in more than the reedy, wavering chords of faith that sounded now out of their blissful tune. To find himself become _more_ than man, to be between them so, the thread that bound an elder wyrm to an Elezen—

Where his aether flickered and flared Nidhogg’s was there to follow, a looming shadow to a cast light—

As Nidhogg had taken so too had he taken in return, worked his jaw around the sinewy give of the dragon’s essence, unable to bear the rough-edged emptiness where Nidhogg had devoured all he had had to pledge and rending from the wyrm his own ponze—

He resonated with Nidhogg like a chapel filled to the brim with song and supplication; as like calls to like a forgotten, unknown part of him roared in chorus, something so horribly strange and yet more familiar to him than his own flesh, straining hot in his blood like a sickness, like magic soothing away crystals of ice.

And when the blunt press of Haurchefant’s waxing arousal met the small of Aymeric’s back, as the ghosting warmth of his breath fanned across the back of Aymeric’s neck—

As Nidhogg took Aymeric’s chin in wicked-claw fingers and lifted it to meet mouth with mouth, all hard lines and savagery in the way he teased Aymeric’s lips apart and licked into him, tasting of smoke and the bitter chill of snow—

Aymeric canted his hips back to feel Haurchefant’s tip sliding between his thighs, hard and hot in a way that made him ache deep in his core, but still unmistakable _flesh_ ; unlike Nidhogg’s scaled and slickened length the Fury anointed this lance with Her blessing, accepting into Her grace this holy union.

Haurchefant desired as any proper man must, in a way that befit and honored his knighthood, that pledged his service to Halone even in the bedroom, in the siring of a new generation of Her devoted and faithful.

Yet Nidhogg did as was his wont—as he existed to do: he defiled it. With one hand upon Aymeric’s chin and the other the bony ridge of a hip, he pulled the archimandrite yet closer, parting the pale flesh of his thighs with the twin heads of his cocks, already too hot and too slick to be mistaken for aught but a dragon’s avarice. Against both Haurchefant’s length and Aymeric’s folds they slid, and the knight’s groan was buried in dark hair as Aymeric tilted his head back and cried out, as he held fast to Nidhogg and trembled with the want to rut against the wyrm, to feel that delicious heat inside him. He knew he was wet with arousal from the way his channel throbbed and fluttered, but when Nidhogg began to move, sinfully slow between his thighs and Haurchefant’s prick, drawing another groan from the knight as he began to fuck Aymeric’s thighs in earnest, ‘twas the slick fluid leaking from Nidhogg’s vent that brought a blissful, wanton heat to the feeling of both Nidhogg and Haurchefant rutting against him, that pushed his arousal even higher, the slick heightening sensation and stimulation, making Aymeric gasp as Nidhogg’s upper cock bumped and slid against his stiff nub.

It was too, too much and yet not nearly enough.

Haurchefant nipped at the lobe of Aymeric’s ear and shuddered as he came, spilling wet against Nidhogg’s cocks and Aymeric’s thighs even as the wyrm continued to fuck them both, and—

  
  
  
  


Aymeric awoke as the crest of climax washed over him, panting and sweating and tangled in his sheets as his hips worked to rut against nothing, as the wet of his own arousal soaked his smallclothes while his core clenched around emptiness.

The dream was already mere snatches of feeling in his mind but Aymeric clung to them as he rolled onto his stomach and shoved three fingers into his loosened, aching entrance, as he fucked himself on them feverishly in pursuit of the fullness he craved.

Within moments he reached his second peak, a muted whine tearing from deep within him to be buried in his pillow, and slowly he stilled, allowing himself the indulgence of riding languid thrusts as he came down from the high.

He would mark the heat he felt fanned across the bridge of his nose as shame, as embarrassment, but—he thought to himself as a slow, measured breath worked out of him, as he let the elbow he had braced himself with slacken, as he sank further into his mussed bedcovers—had he not reached the height of his regret and fallen yet further from it?

To bend his head in deference to the Fury was to court remorse at every turn, as Her path was narrow and at every turn thistles and brambles encroached to ensnare the weak-willed and hesitant. Never in his life had he allowed himself the comfort of embracing fallibility. To err was the province of man, but to strive to be worthy of the Fury's guidance and insight was to embrace the divine. To eschew the simplicity of mortal man; to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of an unattainable perfection.

Aymeric sat up in bed suddenly, his sensitive channel aching with the motion; having fisted his sullied hand in his smalls to cleanse himself of the evidence of his wrongdoing, naught else remained but lingering soreness and the weight of what was surely the Fury's gaze upon him.

The wyrm courted him as temptation given flesh. To content himself with the sorry state of his faith and his spiritual health, with the frail and fraying threads of his aether, with the Fury's silence taken as tacit approval—to betray not only Her, but himself, indolence and avarice being his grave transgressions—was to wander beyond the Fury's protection, to enter into the accursed apostasy of the wyrm.

If She had sent Nidhogg unto him as a test of his convictions, then he had found himself sorely overmatched; the dragon's honeyed words had led him astray, even in the sanctity of his own mind, the blessed oblivion of sleep _violated (_ Aymeric shivered) by the heavy, branding touch of Nidhogg upon his flesh.

How could he have been so foolish? So naive? To have put stock by the duplicitous wyrm's insistence that his terrible hunger was _deserved_ , that it was _purposeful_ , that he intended to be satisfied when his vengeance had been wrought…

A dragon was incompatible with such holy endeavors as temperance and restraint. He would continue to take and to take—and would a heretic be so firm in his convictions if the avarice of a wyrm did not invite him into sinful, unholy pleasure?

Aymeric had felt his own conviction waver in the throes of climax. Yet he—

He was Archimandrite, He must be stalwart; he must be _divine_. He must protect his flock. He must…

He must…

He must hold fast to his faith in the Fury that She had set a path before him with purpose. He must hold fast to his convictions, as Haldrath had, when the man who would become the first Azure Dragoon watched his father laid low before them, when he took up King Thordan's rallying cry and plucked one of the great wyrm Hraesvelgr's eyes from his hateful skull.

Many were those who had fought and fallen in the name of the kingdom She had promised to Her chosen, that for a thousand years had been coveted by their terrible enemy. And for all who walked in Halone's halls, their duties in this endless war fulfilled, the Holy See yet knew naught of their foe besides the methods by which they could be butchered.

Aymeric had known his role to be a perilous one, a treacherous one; a breath in either direction might betray himself to the wyrm, or to the Fury Herself. To covet and collect knowledge as a tool, as a weapon to be wielded, meant he must bow his head and open his heart to the receiving of it.

A chill crept over his bared arms, relaxed beside him where he sat in his bed, and Aymeric's palms set upon the rising gooseflesh, intending to rub at the tender skin; instead he took careful note of the weight of his hands and the meager warmth they offered. Not enough to stave off the bitter cold of Coerthas; but embers compared to the coals that kept a dragon's breath ablaze.

Compared to the hungry heat that seemed invariably to bloom from Nidhogg as though petals from a rose.

He thought then, strangely enough, as a dash of moonlight dappled over his bedcovers, that mayhap the blade of knowledge—which he held close and continued to sharpen, upon the tip of which he had chosen to tread, that seemed every moment closer to discovery (and with it the _accusations_ )—was double-edged.

That he rasped the whetstone against the tool of his own destruction.

That even now, as he breathed alone in his chilled room, clammy with nerves and drying sweat and slick from the ravening peaks of his arousal, that blade was pressed against the hollow of his throat, the hand which held it curious whether he would bleed red from the cut… or ichorous black, as if he seethed under his skin with fang and with claw.

  
  
  
  
  


What sleep he could claim thereafter was thin and dreamless, rising nearly to wakefulness every bell the dawn drew closer; even before the chapel's tower sounded with the lightening of the sky, he was awake, having surrendered the fight when errant eyes glimpsed the endless grey that precluded a day of wisping damp, fog to obscure the jagged teeth of the mountains and even, mere malms to the north, the vicious and lonely ramparts of the Dusk Vigil.

Before the endless snows had fallen across the land, he had on many an occasion ventured to the gates of the keep, there to treat with its sitting Lord Commander; a man named Yuhelmeric, he had been—the similarity spoke only to the rigid standards to which Ishgardian stock adhered, and indicated nothing of relation, distant or otherwise—and he had been no personal friend, but a constant ally of the abbey, if a touch… inconstant with his devotions.

Faith served a purpose in the life of each believer, and it was the folly of the zealot to consider himself privy to the intensely personal relationship between the Fury and Her disciple. Should Ser Yuhelmeric have found himself—as the snows began to fall, and to fall, and to fall without stopping—feeling empty of heart, in need of guidance he had eschewed when firm earth yet remained beneath his sabatons… then Aymeric could only offer the man his blessing, and hope that the lance which had come to bear upon him, testing his convictions and finding him wanting, had not come too late to rally his faculties against the forces that sought his destruction.

As the snows began to fall, and to fall, and to fall without stopping, not once had the Temple Knights of the abbey espied a caravan of chocobos that would indicate the abandonment of the keep—or a caravan of chocobos that would indicate succor granted by the Holy See.

The Convictory lay a short distance to the west, and the abbey was itself hardly a strategic encampment; for these reasons the question of the Dusk Vigil was of little consequence, as the abbey had little reason to expect an assault without provocation or preamble.

Yet even so, Aymeric remembered well the way his stomach settled low, his mount behind him trilling and shivering in the brisk wind, the day he called upon the Vigil and found the gates frozen so firmly closed, as if not a soul had entered or left since the first flakes stained the ground.

'Twas certain the snow was an omen, the bishops of the See had agreed. What they spent many a fortnight arguing, however, was what it might portend; the debate seemed fit to rage on for a year, at least afore Bishop Thordan had announced to an assembly of his peers that he had beheld a vision from the Fury Herself that foretold Hraesvelgr's end heralded by curtains of billowing white.

Would that he had received a vision so clear of his role, Aymeric thought, before dismissing the errant complaint out-of-hand; 'twas unbecoming of him to question the ways in which the Fury chose to work, and less becoming even still to spend the bell before morning prayers in idleness, when the notes on his prepared sermon—on Saint Reinette'e taking up of the cloth and the role of the clergy in this great, glorious, terrible war—languished upon his desk in dire need of a final revision.

It was a sermon he sorely needed to hear, and it could be only the work of the Fury that it had come to him now, upon a schedule he had drafted moons ago. Moons before he had (hadn't?) drawn a High House knight from nearly beyond the veil; moons before Nidhogg had declared his residency, his _haunting_ , skulking about in shadows unbeknownst to almost all, like a persistent stain, like an omen.

To recall the sanctity of his office, the purpose that it served—the _people_ that it did, the descendants of the Fury's chosen, whose right to life was railed against by covetous wyrms who would not suffer the trespass—upon lands the gods themselves had claimed for the Fury's beloved. The purpose that it served in defending the people against the wellspring of their woes…

Aymeric had been in the midst of fastening the clasps of his cassock's stiff collar before his thoughts trickled out of his tenuous hold upon them.

An old and stained mirror, hardly more than a panel of silvered glass, stood against one of the walls in his chambers, and through its mottled lens he saw the reflection of his own hands against his throat, the pads of which seemed to tremble just barely, an unsteadiness almost too minuscule to be felt, only seen, and even then only against the uniform black background of dyed ramie and felt.

If Nidhogg was to be believed, there was more to the tale—a forgotten ledger that may change the balances.

For what reason was there in generations of slaughter, of murder?

Aymeric's hands fell to his waist as he thought; he watched their movement in the mirror without marking, attention eclipsed by the looming silhouette of a dawning realization that yet struggled to take shape.

Nidhogg was a creature of rage and of hatred. His very veins seethed with the essence of incurable, unknowable rancor. And yet the memory of his touch, his _praise_ , his desire to be understood by the enemy he loathed, who fought against him with word and with prayer…

It was bewildering. It was infuriating, to have the surety of Aymeric's resolve shaken by little more than a single granted request.

For what monster of hatred and of rage sought from its bitter rival _understanding_?

What had Aymeric to give him but the succor of his aether? To what end sought he Aymeric's…

Nay.

'Twas the archimandrite who sought.

Not as a shepherd looks to his flock for the prick of their ears and the whites of their fearful eyes, as impressionable and willing recipients of a grace that was _borrowed,_ in some cases _twisted,_ a perversion of the gospel so fashioned as to suit fallible mortal desire and whimsy…

He sought from Nidhogg as the repentant sinner sought the Fury's grace. Desirous of a knowledge that might soothe the roiling of his soul.

In his preoccupation with the travesty of trusting in Nidhogg's forked tongue, he had all but forgotten what it was he meant to know:

whether his father walked in the light of the Fury, or wielded Her name as the lance; as the yoke, condemning Her faithful to lives of cruelty and of loss and of grief, as he set upon them _himself_ the hounds of war, the wyrms that brought only blood and fire and soot and death.

From the belfry the chapel bells trilled a call to prayer, and Aymeric watched the stiffened turn to his mouth in the mirror, how it highlighted a slight hollowing to his cheeks, a paleness to his complexion that spoke naught of the clouds and the snow that had so overtaken the land.

'Twas little wonder his thoughts continued to slip his grasp and spiral, on and on until they echoed in the lofty rafters of his mind like prayers sung to no one. Nidhogg's thieving had left him lean and hungry, alike almost to a starving mongrel—a poor comparison when this house of worship ought to be sanctuary to its own Very Reverend Archimandrite.

Matters could not persist as they lay at present.

Ser Lucia would come to him soon investigating the disappearance of her men; his distraction, his sickly appearance would invoke further attention—

—perhaps even that of his father.

Aymeric shivered as the bells continued to toll, overtaken by a sudden chill that had naught to do with the weight of his robes.

He would see the scourge of Nidhogg's accursed presence lifted from Hemlock Abbey.

It was his duty.

_Whatever it took._

  
  



	6. vi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god im so sorry for being so late for this and also not having any smut in this chapter LOL the two things are unfortunately related
> 
> simply though i work a job that gets deathly busy around the holiday season and it kind of ate me alive this time around. hopefully i wont vanish for so long again! i never mean to do it!!
> 
> good shit happens next chapter!! sorry for all the plot in here and im sorry if anything doesnt land. i am on so much sleep drugs presently but i am stubborn and wanted this out before i went horizontal
> 
> im gonna do that now
> 
> enjoy xoxo

The steady, looming swell of fog had ever been an ill omen for the land-bound prey of airborne terrors.

As the climate of Coerthas grew more chill the hazy mists clung longer to the cliffs and slopes of black rock and white snow, a mottling grey that confused shapes and confounded the eyes of all but the most noble of the nobles’ lanners. Few highborn frequented the Western Highlands, however (save for the fool Convictors), and such prestigious avian companions were not bestowed upon the rank and file of the Temple Knights.

Thus, as midday approached and the pall yet lingered over the spires and buttresses of Hemlock Abbey, Aymeric abruptly recalled the state of the wards upon his last visit to the crypt below the central chapel.

A series of enchantments, tightly interwoven, the purpose of each independent from the others; cloaking enchantments, barrier enchantments, enchantments to repel an intruder with force… All of these took power both from the Archimandrite and the reservoir of aether that lingered below the abbey, in the sanctuary of that heretical altar.

The state of the former was questionable at the very best. And of the latter…

 _Chaplains of the Ishgardian Orthodox Church,_ as began phrasing that he vividly recalled from the footnotes of the sermon he had given that morning, dark-circled eyes belying the steady rhythm of his voice as he fell into practiced habits so profoundly ingrained as to be meditative in their execution, _are typically endowed with impressive aetheric sensitivity, and uniformly taught the skills by which to manipulate aether._ Many of his juniors were theoretically capable of ward casting and ward breaking; but to maintain an awareness of the aetheric expenditure of wards bound to another person? A sensitivity to the natural rhythms of aether, such that a disruption to the Abbey’s aetheric climate could be marked, let alone interpreted, without special attentions paid to such details?

Such a task was beyond them, and Aymeric gleaned a measure of peace from the knowledge that his secret would not be laid bare so easily.

One may find it odd that this should be his first concern, when by all rights he should turn his mind to the possibility of Dravanian minions encroaching under the fortuitous cover that had been afforded them. Whilst the wards of the moment possessed not the power to reduce an overzealous dragonfly to so much ash and dark matter, ‘twas of no consequence to maintain a connection with them such that he would mind even the slightest disruption of the pattern.

Yet the strange surety continued to attend him:

that no harm would befall the Abbey while it remained under Nidhogg’s watchful eye, save that of his own making.

And little reason he had to make war upon them, given the hesitant treatise that had been spoken betwixt the wyrm and the archimandrite.

Aymeric stepped back from the solitary window in his quarters, turning away to regard the state of his room, unerringly tidy despite the roiling tempest of his thoughts.

There remained many moving parts to position, and Aymeric was not overfond of the task. Not least among the outstanding ledgers: the deaths of the Temple Knights that Nidhogg had murdered, that Ser Lucia was surely investigating, every moment another step closer to discerning his involvement.

He had considered approaching her with what amounted to the truth—that he had acted in self-defense, the fact that _he_ had not done the defending notwithstanding—but Nidhogg had not apprised him of the locations of their remains, and to be unable or unwilling to answer to that particular query would only cast suspicion of further falsehood upon him.

The idea of conjuring a fictional alibi _rankled_ him in ways he could not articulate. Despite the very real threat of his murder and the existence of a plot by which they meant to commit it, it seemed a disservice to the memory of those men, and to _himself_ most of all, to engage in the sort of petty politicking and malevolent machinations held dear by the High Houses. ‘Twould be an action he took for his own selfish gain.

 _How many such actions has the Archbishop taken?_ came the unbidden retort from his tired mind—from a shadowy whisper that seemed steeped in soot, not unlike the traitorous raspings of a dragon.

A shudder of revulsion thrilled through him, and he quashed the complaint with but a grimace for its trouble.

Once he may have wanted to become his father. But that time had long passed; and Nidhogg meant to nail the coffin at Akh Afah tonight, when the moon hung at its zenith.

There was much to be done ahead of his audience with the wyrm.

Aymeric took a sidelong glance at himself in the damaged pane of his mirror; his brow creased at the disheveled sight which awaited him. His daily ablutions being not least of those tasks, it seemed.

  
  
  
  


Haurchefant had been standing at his window when Aymeric knocked, as evidenced by the turn he made to welcome his company with no shortage of pleasure when Aymeric stepped into his quarters at the following invitation.

The knight’s recovery proceeded apace, a fact which seemed to contribute to his brilliant smile; while he was still unfit to make the journey back to Ishgard, let alone return to his post, he had taken warmly to his temporary lodgings. The abbey had little to offer in the way of hospitable amenities, but Haurchefant had been quick to assure Aymeric that the simple fact of the room being a single bed and not a barracks represented the _peak_ of luxury to a knight such as himself.

There must be some truth to that, Aymeric thought, taking note of the rumpled bedlinens that seemed to cover the stone floor almost as much as the straw mattress.

“Father!” Haurchefant’s delighted grin would be warming on any other occasion, but he took no note of the way Aymeric froze in response. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

The beet soup, knight’s bread, and Ishgardian tea on a tray in the archimandrite’s hands answered where his words could not; he remained stiff, a tell-tale heat blazing across the tips of his ears as he recalled in no small amount of detail _last night’s dream._

He had meant to pretend that all was well, but he—he—never in his life had he had to look a man in the eyes after such a dream, and he found he did not know _how._

“My friend,” Haurchefant had taken note of Aymeric’s odd silence and come closer, plucked the tray out of his unsteady hands with his own broad and callused palms to set it upon the nearby table (more a desk than a table, Aymeric did not fail to notice; all things being equal, he took to heart much of the knight’s _unsatisfactory_ lodgings as a personal failing, given that he was the master of this estate... after a fashion). “What vexes you so?”

“I am troubled,” Aymeric began, unsure of what he might use as a convenient lie, “by… matters concerning the security of the abbey.”

‘Twas certainly not _untrue,_ though the confession had not been intended; even the mere prospect of lying to Ser Lucia had exhausted him of any effort toward duplicity.

“Has something happened?” Haurchefant held two ilms’ difference on him, and such was a minor consideration at all other times; but now, with his head inclined and tilted, the very picture of a rapt listener, Aymeric felt rather irrationally like a child seeking the reasoned guidance of an adult.

“‘Tis nothing so grave that it should interrupt your supper, my lord,” Aymeric said quickly, shaking some reason back into himself afore he alarmed the knight yet further.

Haurchefant would have none of it; obediently he sat, but the carved spoon rested far from his hand, his other elbow coming to settle upon the table. “So starved am I for excitement that an irregularity in the Archbishop’s most holy bowel movements might capture my interest.”

The alarm upon Aymeric’s visage drew from Haurchefant a crooked little smile, but not a trace of an apology for his horrid lack of decorum; the better to not stammer in shock, Aymeric took a moment to collect his thoughts, seating himself adjacent to Haurchefant when the latter indicated the empty chair with a flick of his eyes.

“In that matter I fear I am unequipped to sate your _burning_ curiosity, my lord,” Aymeric said at last, having turned over all manner of reasonable explanations in his mind. “To… speak plain, there was an attempt made upon my life.”

The creak and groan of dragging wood met Aymeric’s ears, and he looked up from his glance askance to see Haurchefant standing straight up, unseated with visible fury. “Madness!” he exclaimed, eyes wide; only belatedly did he seem to realize the theatrics of his reaction were perhaps _much_ for the present company, and sheepishly he collected his chair and sat himself once more. “When did this happen? Is the fiend still at large?”

Aymeric had expected the inquiry, and had made ready for his response; though the lie tensed his jaw to utter, ‘twas the most reasonable detail to obfuscate, the better to broaden his alibi. “Last night. A most unlikely… _ally_ came to my aid, and I regret to say that I know not what became of them after.”

“Surely you have reported this incident to the Lord Commander?” He spoke of Ser Lucia; Aymeric was unaware of any previous acquaintance between the two, but it was not impossible that Haurchefant might have some familiarity with the woman who held the office. Such an unwavering conviction in the ability of a commoner was rare from a man of noble blood; but then again, Haurchefant had only continued to defy expectations.

“I have reason to believe that the suspects,” Aymeric said quietly, having gained a sudden awareness of the volume of their conversation, “are Temple Knights, under her command 'til but recently.”

Haurchefant seemed poised for another outburst, but the hesitance and quiet in Aymeric’s demeanor had not escaped his notice. After a moment he released a hearty sigh, raising his hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “I do not blame you for your caution, Father. Without knowing how deep such corruption has spread within their ranks…”

“Be that as it may, regardless of my misgivings, the Lord Commander investigates their disappearances, and circumstances elevate the necessity of my testimony.” Aymeric shook his head; he wished he had brought tea for himself, if for nothing else besides the calming effect of its ritual. He could feel the thrum of his pulse accelerating, and—though surely it was a trick of his exhausted mind—he fancied for a moment that he could feel the sudden weight of Nidhogg’s attention turning upon him. ‘Twas not the prickling of an unsought gaze, nor the drag of an expectant silence, and so he dismissed the concern, reasoning that anxiety regarding the night’s plans was making itself known to him, rather than the prodding of piqued intuition.

“You fear the implication of your friend, do you not?”

Aymeric took pause, the statement lingering as if weighted as incense-smoke. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

He had not thought about it that way; he had thought only in terms of his personal misgivings, his own selfish wants. While he held full belief that not a person in this abbey posed a threat to Nidhogg aside from himself, ‘twould not do to throw away the careful scaffolding of understanding they had begun to build by making war upon the dragon when he had not yet slighted Aymeric the same.

“‘Friend’ is perhaps too strong a term, however,” he felt obliged to interject. “He is but a tentative ally; the only bond we share is that of…”

Aymeric stopped. He had meant to finish with “of common purpose”, but that was hardly the case. _Desire_ was the word that rose unbidden in his mind, but despite its veracity, ‘twas wholly... _inappropriate. Heretical,_ were he to fail to articulate the semantics of the situation, and even should he do so...

Haurchefant watched him with sharp eyes, eyes that interpreted every hesitation, every misstep, every fidget in Aymeric’s demeanor. And, as if having come to a satisfactory conclusion, as if having himself unwound the tangle of emotion, a slow smile spread across the knight’s face as the silence continued.

“I understand, Father. Truly, I do.”

Stricken with a foreboding he could not place, Aymeric felt it was best not to press Haurchefant for a greater explanation of just what it was he _understood._ For given the opportunity to explain himself, Aymeric found that words did not rise to meet his questing thoughts; not often did he find himself utterly unable to respond, as suitable words from the Enchiridion were never far from hand in sermon or in prayer.

In having to speak his own thoughts with his own voice, he found himself as steady as a fresh drift of snow.

“Yet to stand for such an injustice, done to the very man to whom I owe my life,” the knight continued, having mayhap taken pity on the archimandrite for the alarm writ large upon his visage (or mayhap his sole intent being to impress his thoughts on his audience before the latter could make good on his attempts to change the topic), “I find is a difficult request to heed. Were I to raise the issue with the Lord Commander of the Temple Knights herself—”

“That will not be necessary,” Aymeric spoke, not altogether comfortable with the action of interrupting a lord of the High Houses but rather less fond of the alternative. “My lord, I must advise against involving yourself with this matter; I fear that squabbles for power regarding a neglected abbey are beneath such an esteemed personage.”

Haurchefant’s lips parted in rebuttal, but seeing this, Aymeric extended a hand to gently rest upon the one of Haurchefant’s that yet lay upon the makeshift table. The gesture bordered on _indecent,_ but as intended, it gave the knight pause.

“Please. Put it from your mind.” Aymeric’s mouth caught upon the next words, for just what he was about to imply, so needful of the knight’s cooperation as to court further indecency.

“For me.”

The pause that lingered on, like clutching fog hidden in pine needle-branches whilst the sun beat overhead to burn it away, was so profound that Aymeric thought he could count every breath that left Haurchefant’s oh-so-slightly parted lips. Yet for all its poignance it was yet only a moment; it passed, as all moments do, and Haurchefant nodded with a crease ‘pon his brow that Aymeric knew hinted at greater tribulations in the future regarding the iron of the knight’s will.

If he wished to avoid Haurchefant’s well-meaning destruction, Aymeric knew he could not dally. He left the infirm knight to his meal and absconded to stand before the Lord Commander’s door; yet it was at this threshold that he found his courage wavering, having had little chance to prepare his remarks.

“Father.”

It seemed almost that Halone Herself had taken pity upon him for the fortuity of the timing, in Ser Lucia’s return to her office to find his fist raised to knock—pity, of course, in the mercy of a swift death.

Aymeric would have jumped, had he nerve left in his body to do so; but his mind and his wits had been both exhausted, and he merely turned to her, looking sallow with such a weariness that Lucia clucked her tongue. “Please, come in,” she said, moving past him to unlock the door. “I’ve little to offer, but some tea and a moment to sit are such distant commodities for you, Father, that I would implore you to indulge.”

“Lord Commander, I—” He had meant to make the beginnings of his claim afore availing himself of the security of her office, but Lucia hushed him none-too-gently, waiting for his feet to clear the threshold to close the door behind him.

“I know why you’re here,” she said, tilting a hand toward one of the ramshackle and poorly-upholstered armchairs near her desk. Not often were they used, except in the presence of polite company, and Lucia indicated one either in a purposeful gesture of welcome or as a subtle assurance that she was being altogether ruthlessly _polite,_ rather than _kind_. A subtle assurance that she had already passed her judgment, and that whatever conversation might ensue would only serve as evidence to pad a decided ledger.

Despite their camaraderie, Aymeric could not call himself adept at reading Lucia’s moods and gestures. Her service at the Abbey was still a somewhat recent affair, having come in the wake of a positively alarming wave of heresy laid bare in House Haillenarte by a junior Inquisitor and the power struggle that such a changing of the guard would precipitate.

 _Guillaume,_ Aymeric recalled belatedly to be the man’s name, but the detail was immaterial.

Aymeric sat, as he was bid, waiting for the Lord Commander to continue her line of thought as the latter prepared water to bring to boil over the fireplace.

“Those men who troubled you some few days ago regarding the opening of the crypt,” Lucia began, her back to Aymeric; though her movements had gone still, the better to dampen the clank and clatter of her mail, and Aymeric knew she listened for an irregularity in his voice or in his breathing. “Do you know their names?”

“I do not,” Aymeric answered—sincerely. Had they been known to him, their faces and names would have haunted his dreams far more profoundly.

For a distinct period of time Lucia did not continue, as if waiting for Aymeric to begin with his business whilst she finished the ritual of preparing tea. Yet he did not; he had willingly subjected himself to the interrogation that had begun the moment Lucia set her gaze upon him, and found he had little desire to steer the conversation, lest he make a more-than-inconsequential blunder.

“Innes and Aurvoix,” she said at last, setting two cups of tea upon her desk, one for each side. Lucia settled into her chair and steepled her gauntleted hands rather than touch it immediately, and Aymeric met and held her gaze, not to be outmaneuvered by Lucia’s studying eyes. “A Hyur and an Elezen. Both young; forty winters between them at most.

“Inquisitor Guillaume worked swiftly to examine heretical elements even in one of the High Houses. ‘Tis plain to me that there exists evidence of heresy here, at Hemlock Abbey, and it is my sworn duty as a Temple Knight to cast the wicked from the Fury’s gaze.”

Aymeric’s heart beat in his chest so loudly he fancied Nidhogg might hear.

“This is alarming to you,” Lucia observed, her gauntleted hands lowering to be spread upon the desk.

“My faith in the Fury is absolute,” Aymeric chose to respond. “I can but believe that She has placed obstacles before Her faithful to identify the strength of their belief.”

“Well spoken,” Lucia replied, then leaned forward in her chair. “In the last few days, have you—”

“Ser Lucia!”

The strong outburst presaged Haurchefant shouldering his way into Lucia’s office, and Aymeric froze at the sudden intrusion, watching helplessly as Lucia’s gaze flickered from Aymeric to Haurchefant.

“My lord,” she began, beginning a slow ascent to standing status, “to what do I owe the pleasure—“

“You must cease this farce of an interrogation at once!”

Silence reigned.

Only the gentle popping and crackling of sap within chopped logs being heated to boiling by the flames served to break it.

Haurchefant’s impassioned declaration came from a rather commanding suit of armor; the livery of House Fortemps embellished certain details, as new as if the date of its original embroidery had not long past. (It had not; this armor _was_ new, carted specifically from Ishgard solely for the sake of this man.)

Aymeric remained frozen, unable to move betwixt the heated gazes of two knights, though one began quickly to soften as thoughts and observations were taken to heart.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Lucia said, pursing her lips and turning her head slightly away; a deferment before someone of a higher class. “I apologize, Father; I seek your aid in the discovery of heretical elements, not to implicate you in them.”

Aymeric’s mouth had been dry for some time, now, and he masked the nearly audible sigh of relief by bringing the teacup to his mouth and taking a lengthy drink. His heart had not yet calmed from its jackrabbit rhythm, prompted by the intensity of Lucia’s focus upon him and perhaps also the gamble Haurchefant had just made with both of their lives in the balance, knowingly or not.

”Ser Lucia,” Aymeric began, once he had drained his cup, looking the woman in the eyes as he set it carefully upon the table. Haurchefant still loomed behind him, having hastily shut the door behind himself, and Lucia still stood, eyes tracing a thoughtful path between Aymeric and Haurchefant. What a strange image they all painted, Aymeric thought.

“Father, those men have been absent from their posts for several turns of the sun, and if you have evidence to exonerate the crimes of desertion under suspicion of heresy, I beg you to share them.” Lucia spoke directly, her tone clipped in its haste, as if she harbored remorse for the earlier misunderstanding and sought to remedy it by dispensing of the relevant information quickly and accurately.

“Those men are dead,” Haurchefant said simply, and Lucia’s expression stiffened.

“These _heretical elements,_ ” the knight continued behind the archimandrite’s head, with Aymeric sitting very, very still in an attempt to not draw attention to himself, “hatched a plot to murder the Very Reverend Archimandrite himself. As a knight of Ishgard ‘twas my solemn duty to lay the fiends low, knowing full well that,” Haurchefant’s eyes bored into Lucia’s, as evidenced by her stiffening grip on the tabletop, “the Temple Knights would sooner have shielded their own.”

“My lord—“ Lucia had begun, but Aymeric stood from his chair, recognizing the incendiary comment as antithetical to the conversation.

“That is enough,” he said, glancing between two stiff jaws belonging to two knights. “We are _allies,_ not enemies. ‘Tis true that I was attacked; however—”

“It is my responsibility,” Lucia said, bowing her head. “I failed in my duty as Lord Commander to protect and safeguard the abbey from all that would do it harm. Whatever punishment is decided for me, I receive of it gladly.”

A moment.

Haurchefant opened his mouth, but Aymeric leveled a stare at him that begged for Haurchefant’s complacency, and he set his jaw in response; a kind and optimistic man he might be, but Aymeric was astonished to see the coals of anger burning in his eyes.

Lucia remained with her head bowed, awaiting judgment, and it struck Aymeric that the anguish she feels in this moment, the _guilt_ of having allowed heresy to thrive unchecked beneath her sight, was a fabrication.

He had lied a dozen, several dozen times, all to arrange the pieces hither in this moment, and the weight of his own guilt threatened to crush Aymeric, to _consume_ him.

“Rise, Ser Lucia,” Aymeric bade her, watching patiently as her gaze rose to meet his. “You have done no wrong in failing to discern the true hearts of those in your service. The Fury Herself relies upon Her faithful to choose to submit themselves to Her service. You did not betray; you were betrayed.”

“Father—”

Both Haurchefant and Lucia spoke in unison, then stopped at the sound of the other’s voice, gazes locking.

“Speak, Lord Haurchefant.”

The knight had clearly not expected to be encouraged to share his words, judging from the jolt of recognition upon the sound of his name, but after a moment of hesitation he did as he was bid, standing up straight and carefully relaxing his posture.

“Ser Lucia,” he began, looking directly at the woman he addressed, whose eyes glimmered over-bright in the wan light of the room, “in my frustration and arrogance, I have wronged you, and I offer my most sincere apologies.” Haurchefant weighed his next words as if deciding whether to continue; he did, more quietly now. “I have but recently lost a close friend to the actions of heretics. To have considered, even if for only a moment, losing another to the same evil… ‘Twas nigh impossible to bear. I wish simply for your understanding, though I do not expect it—far less your forgiveness.”

“Lord Haurchefant…” Lucia cleared her throat, a suspicious waver at the base of it invoking concern. “It is given, and _for_ given. I thank you for your service to our people… and for doing what I could not.”

On this matter Haurchefant was complicit in the falsehood. A strange quiet filled the room as he bowed his head in deference to her; for what else could he do but continue the lie? What else could either of them do?

Feeling suddenly suffocated in the tiny room filled with grief and sadness, Aymeric excused himself (with a few whispered personal words to each of his companions) and made for the sanctity of his own quarters, firmly locking the door once the wood had returned to the jamb.

Deception and deceit.

_Heresy._

How much more harm and suffering will he inflict, if he continues upon the path before him?

(And how much more will he inflict, if he fails in his duty?)

Soon the sun will set, and soon the moon will rise, and soon the appointed hour will come upon him.

By then, perhaps— _perhaps_ —his will could be something stronger than dregs of tea at the bottom of the cup.


	7. vii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> minor torture CW, it's not very graphic but i thought i'd mention it
> 
> hi! i'm back for more bullshit :)
> 
> this chapter speaks for itself. know that i didnt really touch on nearly as much lore as i intended; we'll get there. the chapter is already 1.5x average length because smut is wordy i guess
> 
> i eagerly await the tomatoes thrown at me for the ending, feel free to scream
> 
> enjoy xoxo

Upon the appointed hour, upon the very apex of the full moon's journey across the face of the night sky, Aymeric found himself in the iron grip of hesitance and hindsight, as he paused at the top of the stairs that led down and down into the gloom of the crypt. Midnight shone bright through the narrow windows, cold in its elegance, as if the spun moonbeams had dropped in shimmering cascades from Menphina's spinning wheel itself.

'Twas an omen Aymeric found…  _ suitable  _ for the nature of his appointment. He would accept the Lover's watchful eye upon him without complaint, for though he bent his knee in service to the Fury, the Twelve were as equals united under an Eorzean banner; the affairs of Coerthas and Dravania were of Eorzean heritage, and thus of concern to the gods that governed the breadth of the realm, even should the Alliance and the Holy See fail to convene at the same table.

To speak of the gods' will exerted upon the land was to speak of  _ summoning,  _ and while Aymeric fancied himself a learned man, the finer points of the aetherology of summoning were beyond his ken.

Therefore he put the wandering thoughts from his mind, certain they served as a means by which to delay his descent.

He had already needed to hold for the fulfillment of his petition—Ser Lucia had once more come to his aid, finding perfectly reasonable the idea of revisiting a critical point of the Abbey's defenses, especially in the wake of their earlier conversation—and he was loath to delay his appointment any longer.

Lucia had made idle mention of a cloak, owing to the previous  _ incident _ , and while Aymeric had derived far less mirth from her words than she, he had at least taken the remark to heart; he possessed few garments of suitable function, given that in the last five years he had traveled beyond the abbey's walls perhaps a small handful of times. Yet in anticipation of the cold of subterranean stone, he had cast about his shoulders a heavy cloak of karakul wool and yeti mane, the cloth dyed a deep black and the tufted trim white as snow.

Mayhap he ought consider the potential of such a garment's ruination by steeled claws; but the burden of its safekeeping would perhaps encourage him to better behavior.

He had caught sight of how Nidhogg coaxed at the boundary of his will, and meant this time to deny him. Should it cost him some level of trust with the wyrm, he cared not; for he understood that he held a certain amount of leverage in the scaffolding of their bargain, an amount extensive enough so as to indicate that Nidhogg  _ needed  _ him.

The sentiment warmed him beneath the fur collar, and he shied away from any greater consideration, wary of committing such a folly afore the wyrm had begun to twist his mind.

Aymeric held not a torch, and had no companion within the transept; the entrance to the crypt would remain unguarded and unlit, per his agreement with the Lord Commander, until the dawn hour, at which time it would be sealed. Such an arrangement might seem altogether strange at first consideration, but it was designed to minimize his engagement with the knight whilst Nidhogg remained his primary concern, as well as provide a suitable alibi for the archimandrite to escape the wyrm's clutches.

He could not be too careful, after all. Often had he cast aside his caution in favor of more…  _ impassioned  _ feelings regarding the elder dragon to whom he was irrevocably  _ bonded, _ but he had since wisened to his own agency within their arrangement, and so feared the siren call of  _ servitude  _ that had before been his companion in the throes of their trysts. ‘Twas of no small difficulty to, in full cognizance, retread the paths his mind had wandered down whilst the wyrm exerted upon him those seductive powers; he was no longer lacking for  _ shame,  _ so evidenced by the heat upon the tips of his ears as he regarded some of his more  _ questionable  _ actions.

Aymeric could, of course, _ hope _ that the intricate waxing and waning of Nidhogg’s more subtle gifts were perhaps indicative of either a growing strength or a gradual weakening, given that they two together comprised this terrible dance, whether they stepped together or apart. Yet to harbor such a belief was to commit to supposing on the wyrm's state of being—an altogether curious question, and one to which Aymeric had no answer.

The Dravanians that were so hated and feared by the nation of Ishgard took many forms; wingéd devils, landborne terrors, fiends that walked on two hind legs and spoke with the common tongue. Never before had Aymeric heard, however, of one that might take the shape of something akin to a voidsent. To  _ suckle _ upon harvested aether as would an imp or a gnat.

Nidhogg had spoken before of the belief that man knew not what to call him. Long past was the time at which Aymeric could have perused tomes and papers for a hint; yet, he supposed, he could do a sight worse than to merely  _ ask _ . Nidhogg seemed to harbor less and less…  _ hostility,  _ to be replaced in recent days with…

His thoughts having alighted upon the manner of their last meeting, Aymeric flushed, casting his gaze instead about the modest cathedral that served as the heart of the abbey.

Moonlight glimmered upon the flagstones and the wood-hewn pews, upon crawler silk tapestries and fixtures forged of iron, upon stained glass and upon crystal, and Aymeric knew that he loved this place as the only home he’d ever known.

And as he took the first halting step down, down into the gloom of the crypt, each and every step to follow gaining in confidence and in haste, the worn heels of his boots making soft sounds against the silent stone, he paid little mind to the feeling of  _ parting,  _ of grief and of sadness, as if he left behind him a world he had walked for the last time.

  
  
  


The bracing chill of the dark chambers was familiar to him upon his entrance, upon the final step of the descent, yet the conspicuous lack of  _ fear  _ was not. Trepidation he possessed in bounds; yet he found he did not fear the embrace of darkness as he had at the first, when Nidhogg remained to him an unknown entity of malice and violence.

Not a room was lit. Aymeric felt no surprise; ‘twould have been strange indeed had Nidhogg felt any desire to set this stage, especially for the sake of a man’s comfort. In the all-encompassing darkness Aymeric felt the echoes of eddies of aether, as rivulets left imprints in the soil of a dried-out riverbed, and so he stepped forward with less caution than a man with night-blinded eyes; he passed through the first chamber without incident, pausing before the Akh-Afah altar to let his senses quest and probe.

To his right—a source of heat.

Not of an aetheric sort, no; a Coerthan so weathered by the endless winter needed no such tool to descry that to which all life was inevitably drawn.

Nidhogg lurked beside him, cloaked in shadow and heretofore silent. Yet as soon as Aymeric’s eyes turned in his direction, wandering sightlessly for some glimpse of him—as soon as Aymeric’s hand lifted, as if to reach out, bold in his conviction—the wyrm grasped it with his own, unclothed by leathers or mail, bare skin to bare as the wyrm’s strong fingers closed around the back of Aymeric’s hand, a clawed thumb pressed to the man’s palm.

“Very good,” the wyrm praised, and a familiar heat coursed through Aymeric’s form at the words of praise; yet he gritted his teeth against it, determined to not so easily fall beneath the wyrm’s sway. “Your senses remain sharp, little priest.”

Nidhogg had never radiated such warmth; Aymeric felt him step closer as though clouds parted to reveal the sun, and he wondered at the change, uncertain of what it might portend.

The wyrm’s grip tightened, the claw—curiously more solid, the keratinous tip fit to puncture and rend—pressing gently into the flesh of Aymeric’s palm, and Aymeric’s mouth tightened at the unsubtle threat.

“You hesitate,” the wyrm observed, expression invisible in the darkness but words thick with curiosity. “Did you not come here to speak your mind, pet?”

“I would see you,” Aymeric said, his voice escaping him with an unintended softness, “the better to mark the sincerity of your answers.”

At his request, torches flickered to life in their sconces, two each to a wall in the central chamber; firelight glittered upon the altar’s surface, and Aymeric spared the flames a glance, well recalling the candles that glowed with evil upon their very first meeting.

The flames burned just as they ought: red-orange and crackling merrily.

And before Aymeric, looming scarce an ilm above him, burgeoning with heat that outshone the torches a thousand to one, was Nidhogg—bare of the wicked mail that had oft attended him, clad instead in a simple tunic and slops of thin ramie. Still the crimson threads of aether were woven upon his flesh, and still wicked claws tipped his fingers, but from behind one might mistake the devil for naught but an Elezen, long silver hair flowing free upon the navy-dyed ramie threads.

He had meant to ask a different question. Aymeric’s lips parted, and from them came the query: “Whose form is this?”

Silvern brows arched in guarded surprise. “This is your first demand?”

“When first we met, you told me that aether willingly surrendered is the sole sustenance of,” Aymeric regarded Nidhogg with steady eyes, “‘ _ this form’ _ . It is not yours; you have taken it. Wherefore?”

Nidhogg seemed to think; and as he thought, his grip upon Aymeric’s hand gradually slackened, ‘till the pinprick the claw left upon his flesh finally gained the space to bead with blood. A strange warmth seemed to linger there from the surety of the wyrm’s touch, but Aymeric would not suffer his thoughts to be led astray.

“This will serve,” the wyrm decided at last, gaze lifting to flick to one of the unlit chambers beyond the central room. “Come.”

Together the two circled the Akh-Afah altar and came to stand upon the threshold of the unlit room; Aymeric could make out a solitary chair in the center, whilst the walls remained shrouded in darkness.

A flick of Nidhogg’s wrist, and the torches here crackled to life as well; Aymeric’s gaze was drawn by the motion, and when he looked back to the center of the room, his breath caught in the cavern of his chest.

Upon that rickety chair was the form of a young Elezen man, identical in appearance to that of Nidhogg’s chosen shape. His head was bowed, his hair in tangles and tatters as it framed the slope of his face; from this angle Aymeric could not see if the lines of blood-hued aether attended him.

Despite their presence, the man did not look up; ‘twas a moment before Aymeric descried the use of illusion magics, undoubtedly employed by Nidhogg himself, to assemble the scene before him. Edges of the magicked figure seemed to blur the longer he observed, and Aymeric willed himself to relax, knowing that these events were long past and thus beyond his influence to alter or change.

The man was bound, though ‘twas unclear whether by ropes or chains, whilst other figures near the walls roamed freely; Aymeric caught sight of men in robes of the clergy, among them a particular man with light hair that hung to his shoulders, and Aymeric’s pulse quickened at the sight of him from behind, knowing well the planes of the face that remained hidden from him.

Nidhogg did not speak, and thus neither did Aymeric, as this man took from a desk against the wall some sort of glass phial; another of the attendants, unremarkable in appearance, came forward to close a fist in the tangles of the tormented Elezen’s silver hair, the better to wrench his head back, whilst Thordan—for that was the identity of the first among these torturers—grasped roughly at the prisoner’s gaunt and hollowed jaw to force his mouth to open, emptying the phial upon his tongue.

The silver-haired Elezen thrashed in his bonds, a soundless wail shaking free of him, and Aymeric realized suddenly that the entire conjured play had been mere silent images; Nidhogg’s voice broke the quietude that had fallen over them, deigning to speak only once the critical scene had been absorbed by his captive audience.

“In this man awoke a great and terrible fury, one to rival mine own, and I hearkened to his plea for vengeance. To me he surrendered his body, and to he I promised a release from torment.”

“‘Tis for his sake you seek my father’s end?”

“Our desires are as one,” Nidhogg said, the sight of his gaze resting weightily on the convulsing image of an identical form altogether quite disorienting. “Thordan holds in his grasp the last of my strength as an elder wyrm: one of my eyes, kept below the flagstones of your accursed city for a thousand years as a bloody trophy. His greed disturbed its slumber,  _ plucked  _ it from its suited grave. Denied my rest, it shall be returned to me.”

“And once you have accomplished your task?”

“I will slay him to set right the scales of mine own injustice,” the wyrm said. “Beyond that, I care not. Let my brothers do as they wilt with this broken land; raze it from above and from below, if they must.”

Which other dragon of the First Brood did he speak?—Aymeric thought against asking, given that a simple curiosity might lead them both astray of the intention of their meeting.

“See you now the legacy your father would leave you?” Nidhogg asked him, then, turning to Aymeric with an expression that could not be placed by mortal eyes; perhaps it was anger,  _ fury,  _ or perhaps it was a rancor a thousand years in the making, unfathomable by a mind such as his own. “See you now what fate he meant for you, to abandon you in this place, so suffused with tragedy of his own making?”

Aymeric had believed his father a holy man; yet the sight of his actions in this chamber had been anything but.

Doubtless these were the “demonstrations” the writings had spoken of, and yet… Whatever suspicion of heresy laid upon Thordan’s victims, to mark them as chattel, to divest them of the trappings of their rights as people, the man himself had turned from the gaze and the path of the Fury, and Aymeric understood with far greater certainty the sanctity of his own purpose.

“The Fury would see these wrongs righted,” Aymeric said, heedless of the sneer that alit upon Nidhogg’s face at his proclamation. “As I had supposed, as I had  _ hoped…  _ I see now that Her will and yours are indeed the same.”

“This matter is of no concern to your little  _ goddess, _ ” Nidhogg spat, incensed at Her invocation, as should be any wyrm. “My will is mine own, little priest, though  _ yours  _ remains weak. I had thought that the sight of such transgression would awaken you to the truth, though it seems my faith was ill-placed.”

The illusion faded, the flames guttering till at last they burned to nothing, the chair sitting alone again half-awash in darkness, and Nidhogg turned to Aymeric, fury writ plain upon his visage.

“Thordan meant for you to die in his place. Does not your heart cry out for vengeance? Seek you truly nothing more than your Lady’s favor?”

_ No.  _ The answer rang traitorously in Aymeric’s heart.

No.

His desires were greater.

He fought to keep the trip of his pulse constant, leery of the wyrm’s spitting growl, the heat of his red-glowing eyes; but some glimmer, some  _ flash  _ betrayed him, and Nidhogg canted back from his looming approach, struck with a surprise that turned, swiftly, to a smug sort of glee.

“You seek to  _ surpass  _ him,” Nidhogg observed, a predatory smile widening, displaying between his lips the tips of his fangs. “Do you not?”

Aymeric did not respond.

He felt drawn as taut as the string of a bow, the claws of Nidhogg’s sharpened attention holding him stiff; were he to snap, were he to be  _ released,  _ he did not know what would become of him.

To even  _ court  _ the possibility of speaking true his mind… ‘twas unbearable to consider.

Displaying a patience Aymeric thought beyond the wyrm, Nidhogg awaited his answer; yet when the silence continued beyond the normal collection of the archimandrite’s thoughts, the dragon seemed to come to a conclusion that yet remained beyond the scope of Aymeric’s supposition, consumed as he was with the insurmountable burden of pretending he did not know where his heart lay.

“Again you hesitate.” Nidhogg stepped closer by a fulm, and then another, till scarce enough space to breathe remained between them; this close the fanning heat of Nidhogg’s body was unmistakable, and Aymeric struggled not to let it consume him, to  _ surrender  _ to the wyrm and the base comforts he might give, as he had done so many times before. To let the union of flesh disrupt the turn of his thoughts; to continue to  _ lie  _ to himself by the claim of ignorance, having driven the truth from his mind with pettier and less important fears, concerns,  _ pleasures. _

“Listen to me.” Nidhogg  _ reached,  _ then, a clawed hand cupping gently at the curve of Aymeric’s jaw, the thumb that had punctured his palm tracing now at the seam of his lips. “There is no morality in this world save one’s own, little priest. Unburden your heart of the fetters of  _ others’  _ shame ere that shame  _ consumes  _ you. Decry your father as the wickedness that you abhor, and let the actions you take against him become the justice you so wish to embody. Is it not holy to cast down the wicked, and then to rise above it? Is it not holy to serve your fellow man as a  _ leader? _ ”

Nidhogg drew in close such that the sight of him consumed Aymeric’s vision; and yet the archimandrite did not yield, his lips seamed firm against the probe of the wyrm’s thumb. Seeing this, Nidhogg changed tact; he arched his neck, pressing a close-lipped kiss to Aymeric’s temple, and then pulled away.

The room before him that met Aymeric’s sight then was one he had only envisioned in dreams: flawless white stone and panes of clear glass to allow the wintry light inside. A long and empty approach, awaiting a raised dais, upon which they stood.

And, as Aymeric turned to follow the path Nidhogg took, an ornate seat that rested alone upon it, seeming to shimmer with the holy light that fell upon it.

Nidhogg’s Elezen form was diminutive against it, such was the scope of grandeur; for a moment Aymeric failed to notice that the wyrm’s ensemble had changed, once again clothed in wicked black spikes and leathers, his attention utterly arrested by the bared thighs and nethers that framed both of Nidhogg’s lengths, standing fully erect, already wet to dripping with slick.

“Come,” Nidhogg bade him, a lazy beckon with one gauntleted hand as the other remained motionless upon one arm of the seat. “Take your throne, Archbishop.”

So was his ambition laid bare before him, bereft of any of Aymeric’s carefully-curated doubts, caveats, and moral suppositions. None of the tools by which he had tempered the fire that burned in his breast; he  _ wanted,  _ and had made his peace with the wrongness of wanting, with adherence to the Fury’s plans and path, with  _ chastity,  _ with  _ denial.  _ As should the holiest of men.

Yet was it so wicked to desire, to  _ want,  _ when in the desiring and in the wanting he would be serving his people, his nation, by deposing a greater evil?

This was the question Nidhogg posed to him.

Was it so wicked when ‘twas the province of man to desire, to want, searching only for the justification that might marry his heart to his beliefs?

...Was it so wicked to indulge, just the once, when the authority and the agency of refusal would yet remain his?

...Would it bring him a long-sought peace of mind, to indulge in a harmless fantasy?

For perhaps the first time in Aymeric’s life, thoughts of the Fury’s gaze were far from his mind as he approached Nidhogg, with steps slow and deliberate, his cloak perhaps a suitable raiment for his pretend office, the comforting weight grounding him as the heavy hem fluttered about his calves.

At the foot of the throne Aymeric came to a stop, gaze locked to Nidhogg’s red-eyed and thinly-veiled lust.

Nidhogg had said that no task would remain to him when his vengeance had been completed.

“Would you serve me like this?” Aymeric’s voice was a whisper, spoken from above, gazing down upon Nidhogg’s upturned face.

“Shall we see?” answered Nidhogg.

Were Aymeric to retrace the next moments in his mind, he would struggle to piece together the exact sequence of events; had he fallen upon Nidhogg’s mouth with his own afore, or after Nidhogg had seized the ridges of his hips under his gauntlets? Had he stripped himself of his own trousers, or had Nidhogg rent swathes in the fabric, as was his wont?

‘Twas nearly wholly immaterial, however, once Aymeric had sat himself astride the wyrm’s lap, knees upon the cushion of the throne; warmth surrounded and suffused him, not least where the lower of Nidhogg’s twin lengths canted against Aymeric’s folds.

_ Twelve,  _ he had been wet since Nidhogg put himself on display on this throne, just for him.

Aymeric  _ ached  _ to take him inside, as he had craved for what seemed almost  _ centuries,  _ so feverish were his dreams regarding the matter; yet no matter how strong his lust or his will, ‘twould take no small amount of preparation, he knew.

Yet Nidhogg insistently pulled on the curves of Aymeric’s hips. At this Aymeric grit his teeth and steadied himself with one hand upon an intricate spire crowning the back of the throne, the better to take the other and fist it in Nidhogg’s hair, there to  _ pull. _

Against the point of Nidhogg’s Elezen ear Aymeric hissed. “You will  _ obey. _ ”

Nidhogg’s eyes glinted with challenge, though he still looked  _ up.  _ “Then command me.”

“I will take my pleasure from you,” Aymeric said, “and you will allow me, and you will not  _ touch  _ without my command. Am I understood?”

If Nidhogg meant to argue, the words did not make it from his mouth; Aymeric pressed his own there instead, flexing his thighs to rut against Nidhogg’s cock as he tugged at silvered locks and worked his tongue against Nidhogg’s own.

That preternaturally  _ arousing  _ slick he remembered well from their last encounter, the way the taste of it lit a fire of lust in him nigh unquenchable, and from the way his hunger seemed only to grow as he canted himself against the slickened length, ‘twould not be remiss to assume the effect was similar.

_ How might it feel inside him? _

The control was his; should the size prove insurmountable he could alter his methods,  _ prepare  _ himself more sufficiently…

Yet though he desired the satisfaction of being  _ filled  _ so, too, did he desire to wring from Nidhogg a pleasure in submission, and to bid him acquiesce to Aymeric’s demands in whatever order he so chose, regardless of whatever Nidhogg might  _ crave, _ would serve just as well in the endeavor.

So he chose.

With one hand upon the throne and the other braced now on Nidhogg’s spined pauldron, having released his hair for a more tactile grip, Aymeric steadied himself, thighs splayed open, just above the tip of Nidhogg’s lower cock.

The tapered point parted his folds as well as any finger, and Aymeric trapped a long breath within his chest as the first ilm breached his entrance; there he paused for but a moment, watching the planes of Nidhogg’s face for any sign of revolt as Aymeric awaited a slight loosening of his channel. He longed to hilt himself and sod the consequences, and it took every thread of his self-control to not acquiesce to the desire, but he held a private conviction that he would regret the pain more than he would truly enjoy it.

Another ilm, carefully taken; and then another, and Aymeric breathed out slowly, feeling the stretch ease as he sank yet lower,  _ lower,  _ until his thighs were flush with Nidhogg’s and the gasp that was punched from Nidhogg’s throat at the feeling of bottoming out inside Aymeric was met with one in kind at the sensation of being filled to the  _ brim _ with the wyrm.

Aymeric solidified his grip on the throne and on Nidhogg, and slowly raised himself, marveling at the sensation; whatever breath he had managed to fill his lungs with was punched out by the subsequent rhythm he fell into, that the lust of his body  _ demanded,  _ ever-worsening with every stroke, as more and more of that slick was worked into him. Little “ah”s of breath escaped Aymeric as he worked himself upon Nidhogg’s length, the other dragging hard against his clit with every stroke, and he felt his climax fast approaching; yet it did not fully break upon him until he  _ looked,  _ and realized that Nidhogg was not in fact remaining still of disinterest, but that his gauntleted fists had curled into the arms of the throne, near to quaking with the intensity of his pleasure.

Aymeric rode him and Nidhogg  _ obeyed;  _ he allowed the priest to take the pleasure he wilt, a clear  _ yielding  _ in the way he grit his teeth and growled, a low-pitched noise that had escaped Aymeric’s notice afore now, so constant was the grip of Aymeric’s channel upon him.  _ Twelve,  _ Aymeric  _ ached,  _ full to bursting at the seams with cock and yet it was not  _ enough,  _ needing just one more ilm of sensation, one more admission of Nidhogg’s obedience—

Aymeric took Nidhogg in to the hilt and the dragon  _ groaned,  _ bucking his hips as he had not afore now (he had not  _ touched _ and so Aymeric forgave him the transgression) to sink his length just an ilm deeper, the better to achieve his release; and release he did, an eruption of warmth inside Aymeric’s channel that far outstripped what he could reasonably hold, that spilled from him in the tiniest gaps left between his fluttering entrance and the girth of Nidhogg’s length; the other of his cocks, the one that had canted against Aymeric’s folds so wantonly, surged with release against him there, sullying his bare skin with dragon seed that glowed with an inhuman heat and silvery shimmer.

‘Twas both the sensation of Nidhogg’s release and the mistake of glancing down, to see his form so ruined by the conspicuous shine of Nidhogg’s seed, that tipped Aymeric over the edge of his climax; he held still, braced against Nidhogg, as he quaked with the force of sensation, his channel spasming with Nidhogg still inside him.

He could  _ feel  _ the release as it dripped from him, and Aymeric knew his face was flushed scarlet as he so wantonly stained the facsimile of the Archbishop’s throne with dragon seed, so he remained with his forehead pressed against the cold metal of Nidhogg’s pauldron until the wyrm took note of his continued silence.

Too tender was the touch upon the middle of his back, as Nidhogg asked, “You’ve had your fill?”

“I did not say,” Aymeric began, control over his words a struggle with the intensity of his climax, “you should not  _ speak,  _ wyrm.”

“Oh?” Nidhogg sounded as though he smiled at the remark, though not the sort of smile born purely of mirth. “Should I have spoken, then? Spoken of the  _ depravity  _ you so clearly enjoyed, to have ridden an elder wyrm as if his  _ cock  _ was the true throne you craved—”

Aymeric turned his head, the better to kiss Nidhogg with force; he meant to forestall the words, not fully in the mind to endure his merciless goading, but the way he clenched around Nidhogg’s already stiffening length served as enough confession.

He should ache to within an ilm of his life, but Nidhogg’s accursed slick had done its job and more, and Aymeric groaned plaintively as Nidhogg bucked beneath him, just one roll of the wyrm’s hips enough to kindle his want back to blazing.

“Insatiable creature,” Nidhogg remarked, raising a gauntlet to run armored claws through Aymeric’s sweat-slicked hair, and Aymeric had not the heart to reprimand the wyrm for the disobeyed orders; ‘twas a different sort of enjoyment to let Nidhogg have his way, and having experienced both, Aymeric found he could appreciate each in their own time. “Shall I take you next?  _ Conquer  _ you, and fill your thoughts with nothing but worship?”

The wyrm and the archimandrite both knew Aymeric’s agreement in the matter was unnecessary; to speak it was treason, and his consent had long been apparent. They two would not be here now if but an ilm of hesitation remained in Aymeric’s body; whatever the particulars, their goals were aligned, and they were bound to one another.

Nidhogg lifted Aymeric effortlessly, still seated within him, and the scenery whirled ‘round them; another illusion at work, and Aymeric marveled at the concentration necessary to maintain the spell.

Someone’s private quarters, far more opulent than his own—yet within them were personal effects Aymeric recognized from his own room, personal effects that Nidhogg had apparently paid enough attention to memorize. (The thought flattered Aymeric more privately than any bit of half-sincere praise.)

And an equally opulent four-poster bed, the likes of which would not be out of place in any High House estate.

“Your quarters, Archbishop,” Nidhogg said derisively, though Aymeric knew in the attention to detail that a greater depth of emotion was present than mere ridicule.

Back-first, he was laid down upon the sheets, deceptively soft and cool to the touch despite their conjured nature, and Nidhogg centered himself between Aymeric’s thighs, still half-inside him.

“How I’ve longed to defile you so,” the wyrm said, giving a shallow thrust to waken Aymeric’s arousal, and the archimandrite allowed the wyrm his words with no response save a deepening flush.

They both remained half-clothed, Aymeric in his frock and cloak and Nidhogg in most of his mail save the trousers, and yet Aymeric felt bared before the wyrm’s eyes, a strange undercurrent of emotion within them that he could not place.

A breathy “ _ ah”  _ was forced from the archimandrite when Nidhogg thrust again, deeper this time though still without rhythm, the wyrm seeming to consider and then reconsider, gauntlets closed against Aymeric’s bared thighs. (Those would surely leave marks, but Aymeric found he could not muster the will to care.)

“So wanton,” the wyrm said, “so…  _ loose.  _ Loose enough to take  _ all  _ of me, I wonder?”

_ All? _

Understanding bloomed upon Aymeric’s face, and he could not help but to splay his thighs wider in want.

“Hm.” The wyrm chuckled. The upper of his twin cocks dragged against Aymeric as he thrust languidly, just enough to keep Aymeric’s desire alight, and not nearly enough to  _ sate  _ it. “Shall I?”

“Yes,” Aymeric breathed, both of his hands going to fist in the sheets, the better to prepare himself for the inevitable  _ intensity  _ of what was proposed.

“Scream if you desire,” Nidhogg said, slowly drawing himself out of the warmth of Aymeric’s channel (why on Hydaelyn was he doing that?). “No one will hear you.”

An ominous statement; but Nidhogg knew better than any that ‘twas a relief to Aymeric’s ears and not a threat.

His shame was enough. The guilt of exhibition was yet beyond him.

Nidhogg fisted both of his cocks gently, careful not to nick them with his claws, and secured his grip on one of Aymeric’s thighs as he teased both tips against his entrance. With the taper taken into account, the initial press was deceptively easy… but when the ridges of both heads bulled inside Aymeric  _ wailed,  _ a sound he had not known he was capable of, at the severity of the stretch. His grip rent holes in the conjured sheets, so intense was his hold upon them, and he struggled to breathe evenly, eyes locked to Nidhogg’s.

The wyrm released his grip upon his own flesh, raising that hand to Aymeric’s cheek, there to stroke at it tenderly, mindful of his armor.

“Take your ease, pet. It will hurt less.”

Aymeric grit his teeth and nodded, wary of speaking, lest he bite his tongue off in the shock; his dark hair was tossed against the white sheets, his come-slicked nethers on full display for the wyrm, and were he to see how  _ debauched  _ he looked he might’ve gone scarlet with embarrassment. Yet fortunately his focus was elsewhere, most notably on the twin burns of  _ stretching  _ and  _ lust  _ within his loins, and he rolled his hips the barest ilm, desperate to continue, desperate to sate the unnatural heat that Nidhogg’s release had wakened in him again.

“Hmph.” Nidhogg’s snort of derision precluded another shallow thrust, the better to work further into Aymeric, and the archimandrite’s back bowed, the better to accept inside the  _ impossible  _ girth, convinced that in some manner he had grown more  _ pliant  _ with Nidhogg’s seed within him, sticky and thick and setting him alight.

Surely he was not capable of this naturally; Aymeric found his errant glance drifting down and thought he might have caught sight of a visible  _ bulge,  _ a ridge of light and shadow catching upon his stomach that indicated Nidhogg’s presence within him, splitting him open, and regardless of whether ‘twas a sight he had not mistaken he found the sensation of being so thoroughly  _ ruined  _ to be an arresting one, and he groaned aloud again, Nidhogg sliding into him deeper as he willed himself to relax ilm by ilm.

At last,  _ at last  _ Nidhogg hilted within him, just shy of striking the very base of his channel, and Aymeric breathed out carefully slowly whilst Nidhogg adjusted his grip, pressing inexorably at Aymeric’s thighs until the wyrm was bent over him, the added weight contributing to the feeling of being  _ possessed,  _ of being absolutely ruined for anyone or anything else, and the anticipation of being  _ broken  _ led Aymeric to a nervous swallow.

Nidhogg’s pace was deceptively slow at its outset, a gentle slide of his cocks inside Aymeric’s slickened passage; yet after a moment the wyrm gave a deep growl and quickened his work, bending over even further to fuck Aymeric into the bedding.

The pace punched the breath from Aymeric’s chest and thereafter his attempts to inhale were interrupted by breathy little  _ “ah, ah” _ s as Nidhogg claimed his channel; one errant, deep thrust struck home and Aymeric  _ writhed,  _ overcome with an absurd desire to take Nidhogg even deeper, if such a thing were possible—yet considering just  _ how much  _ of the wyrm was splitting him open he supposed he should not dismiss the impossible out-of-hand.

Taking Aymeric’s response as guide Nidhogg adjusted his angle, brutalizing that point within Aymeric with vicious thrusts that left him open-mouthed and nearly drooling, unable to muster his wits with how insistently the sharp bursts of pleasure invaded his faculties; he could think of  _ nothing  _ else, and in fact thought of not much at all besides somehow wanting  _ more,  _ and when one of Nidhogg’s hands moved to palm roughly at one of Aymeric’s breasts through his still-present clothing Aymeric found himself  _ keening  _ wordlessly, tumbling over the edge of climax without ceremony.

In the throes of his peak Aymeric barely heard Nidhogg’s choked growl of  _ “mine,”  _ though the fact of his finding his release buried inside Aymeric was itself quite unmissable; whilst before some of it had found its exit he was now too full of Nidhogg to allow its passage, and the swell of his stomach was, though modest, a definite presence, the sheer  _ volume _ of Nidhogg’s twin releases necessitating such a drastic change.

_ Every part  _ of Aymeric felt stuffed full, and only at this moment did he feel the relief of his preternatural lust seeming to break, as if the desire that had kindled in him since their first encounter upon the altar had finally found its fulfillment.

Upon the altar; which was where they were, decidedly, the illusion fraying apart at the seams as its master set loose the threads of magic; Aymeric’s palms rested against cool stone, the sheets he had ruined having been the fabric of his cloak in reality, seams and threads having been pulled apart by the force of his iron grip.

Nidhogg panted, still buried within him, and Aymeric attempted slowly to raise himself to his elbows (though he felt almost too beaten and battered to move), the better to gaze upon the wyrm, who had not oft stayed past the fulfillment of his climax; the change was curious to him, and he waited for the upturn of red eyes, the better to gauge the wyrm’s emotion.

Yet the eyes that greeted him were not those at all.

They were clear, a shade of blue not altogether unlike the blanket of the night sky, and fully and wholly  _ Elezen _ —not a trace of the wyrm remained within them.

So too were banished the marks of red, and Aymeric froze under the stranger’s gaze, mindful of their intimate  _ embrace  _ and the circumstances to which he had awakened.

“Well,” the other Elezen said very, very softly, “I suppose that wasn’t very polite of me.”

**Author's Note:**

> in [the book club](https://discord.gg/KVN73r7) we have more fun
> 
> follow up with me [on twitter](http://twitter.com/gayprotagonist) to enable me to produce even sexier heresy even faster


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